Exploring Moral Courage Of Investigative Journalists with Dr. Anthony Feinstein

00:00 – Doug (Host)
Our guest today is neurosychiatrist Dr Anthony Feinstein, author of the book Moral Courage 19 Profiles of Investigative Journalists. We discuss moral courage and how it manifests in the journalists he profiled, and how freedom of the press is an essential foundation of democracy. I’m Doug Berger and this is Secular Left.

00:40
Our guest today is Dr Anthony Feinstein. He is a psychiatrist Correct and professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He runs a multiple sclerosis behavioral research lab devoted to understanding the complex cognitive and mood related changes that occur in people with this disease, and then his second strand of research explores the psychological effects of conflict on journalists. Feinstein consults on this with news organizations from New York Times, cnn, globe and Mail, and his new book is Moral Courage 19 Profiles of Investigative Journalists. He brings us essays based on interviews he conducted with 19 international journalists who face grave threats, harassment and physical violence because of their refusal to keep quiet in response to corrupt and intolerant governments, and in doing so, he explores a key attribute that explains this remarkable dedication moral courage. Thank you for being with us today, dr Feinstein.

01:43 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Yeah, thank you for your interest. Happy to be here.

01:48 – Doug (Host)
You know your day job says in your bio that you’re a neuro-psychiatrist working with people with multiple sclerosis. What drew you to the topic of journalists in conflict?

01:59 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Yeah, it’s two very different areas. And I got interested in journalists because, going back to 1999, a person was referred to my clinical practice and at first glance it looked like she had a neurological condition. She was having difficulty speaking and a level of consciousness was reduced. But the neurologist ruled out any neurological diagnosis and the conclusion was that this was an extreme stress reaction. And she turned out to be a frontline reporter who had been working in East Africa covering some very difficult stories of famine and seen a lot of death and dying. And she had gotten into emotional difficulties while out in the field doing her work. And I remember saying to her she did very well with psychotherapy. She recovered. But I remember saying to her why had you not reached out for help when you could see yourself getting into these difficulties? And she said to me you don’t understand my profession that if I tell my editors I’m struggling this way, they would pull me for my work and then I wouldn’t go back.

02:58
So I thought this was really quite punitive and, intrigued by her presentation, I remember saying to my MS team at the time you know, take a couple hours break from the work, the lab work, and let’s do a literature search let’s see what’s been written on the topic of journalists and trauma and emotions, and we never found a single publication. It was not one publication devoted to this topic. It is a huge literature on, you know, trauma in veterans, soldiers and victims of assault and rape, et cetera, but nothing on journalists. And so, intrigued by this, I wrote a grant application and sent it to the Freedom Forum in Washington DC. And, you know, the world back in 1999 was a much simpler place. It was, you know, pre-911 and the economy was strong. And the Freedom Forum wrote back and said what a fascinating idea. We’ll find your research. And it just started me on this journey. It just stayed on ever since.

03:50 – Doug (Host)
Now you profile journalists who cover wars and corruption. Both Do you see them equally as hazardous?

04:01 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
I do Wars hazardous for the obvious reason that you know, people are firing guns and missiles, et cetera, and we get killed. But the investigative journalists, the ones that I profiled, are working in countries in which governments have very little tolerance for their kind of work and they target journalists in very vicious and nasty ways. And a journalist get killed. You know one of the journalists in my book, anna Polikovskaya. A Russian journalist was killed for her investigative reporting. The Turkish journalist Kandunda survived in a assassination attempt. So this is very, very dangerous work. Bad governments, repressive governments, don’t want to free press and the journalists have the courage to speak out of issues that governments don’t like and pay a very heavy price for doing so.

04:50 – Doug (Host)
Yeah, I know, in the recent news, recent current events, we had that whole incident with Saudi Arabia and they killed a reporter that was investigating the government, and so you know, sometimes it gets a lot of press, sometimes it doesn’t. Usually it depends on probably how popular or how well known the the journalist is.

05:14 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
I think that’s correct. You know, and the countries that I wrote about aren’t necessarily, you know, in the people’s consciousness all the time places like Bangladesh and Paraguay, azerbaijan, but they’re very, very courageous journalists in those countries who are standing up for the new freedom of the press, the right-hand expression, the absence of corruption. And what’s interesting is that in these countries there are often the very last vestiges of civil society that the dictatorial and authoritarian rulers have destroyed much of civil society in these countries and it’s left to a few journalists to be the the remaining vestiges of any kind of freedom in the country.

05:59 – Doug (Host)
The title of your book again is Moral Courage 19 Profiles of Investigative Journalists. What do you mean by moral courage and how is it important?

06:09 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Right. So when I interviewed these journalists, I was looking to try and understand motivation. What makes them do this work, what makes a journalist stand up to a dictatorial leader, knowing that the consequences for them are going to be very severe? And I found a common thread that linked the journalists. Well, just to be clear, motivation is complex, you can’t boil it down to a single thing and motivational vary from person to person. But the common thread that I could elicit was what I call moral courage, and this has been in a very well-defined by a researcher, rushworth Kitter, who described three essential building blocks that you need to have.

06:47
This condition Number one, it needs to be the presence of danger, which is you see it in my journal. Then you’ve got to have the principles. You’re looking at moral principles that corruption is bad and democracy is good. But then you need endurance, you need the desire or the drive to do something. You’ve got to be able to commit to action and sustain that action. So when you’ve got a dangerous situation, strong principles and this commitment to action and you fulfill that action, then these three factors coalesce at what’s left, what they come together as to form moral courage, and that’s what you see in all 19 journalists whom I’ve interviewed, and I believe that moral courage arises as an antidote to moral injury.

07:35
That’s my other theory, and you probably say well what is moral injury, and the definition that I like comes from Syracuse University, where they say it’s a condition that can arise from witnessing or perpetrating or failing to prevent acts that transgress your moral compass. So from that, you see, it comes from acts of commission, things that you might do or other people do that are morally egregious, or it might come from things that you don’t do, that you fail to do. I never spoke up, I kept quiet. Acts of omission and in these journalists, to a man and woman, acts of omission are unacceptable to them. They can’t keep quiet in the face of what they see in their own country. If they do so, they might feel those emotions that come with moral injury, which are fundamental things like shame and guilt and anger, and so for them, speaking up and saying something keeps moral injury at bay, even though it comes with often terrible consequences, from the government.

08:34 – Doug (Host)
And when you were talking to people about where their motivation for their moral courage came from, was it mainly from people that had religion, or was it from secular places, or was it like a combination of both?

08:49 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Yeah, you know, that’s another question that really interests me. Where do you get this moral courage from? It is a nature, it’s a nurture. What are the origins of it? And I think, once again, it’s complex For some journalists.

09:03
They’ve clearly followed a role model in a parent. I’ll give you an example Kadija Ismailova, from Azerbaijan, who calls out corruption in Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is a terribly corrupt society. They’ve got a lot of oil money and the government’s stealing it, basically. But her father had been a minister in the government responsible for oil and he had called out his own colleagues because of their corruption and he paid a very severe price he lost his job as a government minister. He couldn’t work there after the family got into financial difficulties as a result. So Kadija would have seen that growing up as a child, there was a role model. As an adult, she’s doing exactly the same thing. The government’s coming after her in a very vicious way, trying to undermine her, to lock her up. They cast doubts on her character, but you see, she saw her parent do something like that and the other journalists who saw their parents make similar courageous stands.

09:57
I think there is the nurture model, there’s a role model. They can learn from a parent. But then you get journalists like Gwen Lister, who was so instrumental in helping Namibia get independence from the South African occupying army at the time and she made a very principled stand against apartheid as a journalist, once again paid a heavy price for it. But for her as a very young girl, she’s traveling on a bus in South Africa in the 1960s when the party was very entrenched and the buses were segregated according to race, so white people could sit downstairs but black people had to go upstairs on the double deck of buses. And there’s this kid sitting on this bus. When the elderly black woman gets on the parcels and Gwen can see this is going to be very difficult for this woman to make it up the stairs, and so she just gets up and gives her seat to this woman and in doing so, all the white people on the ground floor of the bus or furious. Why are you doing this? You’re breaking racial segregation. So why does a kid do that? She’s so young.

11:02
Where did the sensibility come from? She didn’t come from a political family. There was no role model at home that could have guided her to a decision. She just felt it instinctively. And then what’s remarkable is she stayed true to that moral compass for the rest of her life and she devoted herself through journalism to trying to bring down apartheid and bring democracy to this country called the Midia, which at the time is called South West Africa. So there it’s harder to see. Where does this come from? It just seems to be something innate that this young girl had, which stayed with her for the rest of her life, and she had this endurance that I spoke about, this kind of commitment to action which she kept going for decades, faced by a lot of danger, staying true to her principles. So you see the moral courage there. So harder to understand the source of her moral courage.

11:49 – Doug (Host)
And why do you think moral courage is so important to a free press?

11:55 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Because I think without it, you will not have the free press in some of these countries. I really believe that If you didn’t have this small group of very brave journalists standing up for what they believe, despite knowing the consequences of what they’re doing, there would be no free press at all. In fact, you can argue there is no free press in that country. It’s just these few journalists who have the courage to call out bad governance and call out a bad leader. But if they didn’t do it, then there’d be nothing left in that country. And what’s intriguing is that the citizens of those countries know it, and so they look to these few journalists as a source of news, as a source of inspiration, because, as I say, they are the last remnants of civil society.

12:40
If you look at Russia, putin’s just basically shelled out any kind of democratic institution. There’s nothing there. The courts are corrupt, they do what the government wants, there’s no due process, et cetera. The NGOs have been forced to leave the country. Any kind of institution that supports liberty and democracy has gone, has been destroyed. What’s left behind are these few journalists, and even they have now had to leave after the invasion of Ukraine. But it’s the same model for other countries as well. The last remnant of a free society is often these courageous journalists.

13:15 – Doug (Host)
And which journalist that you profiled in your book had the biggest impact on you while you were writing it, and what’s the biggest takeaway we should take from them.

13:26 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
That’s a difficult one because they all filled me with admiration. Someone might near had dicks at working in India. India touts itself as the world’s biggest democracy, but democratic institutions are being consistently undermined in India. India is really slipping down from being a democratic country to one that’s becoming increasingly autocratic under its current leaders. And what she’s done is she’s stood up for women’s rights, for marginalized people in her society. If you’re not a Hindi, you can have a very hard time with it. She comes from the right religious group in that country. She’s going to have a very comfortable life in India if she kind of towed the party line, but she doesn’t.

14:19
She writes about child brides and discrimination and the abuse that women have to suffer, the violence that Muslim people in the country has to suffer. She does it in such a courageous way even though she is being harassed relentlessly online very vicious harassment with a nasty sexual content. To what she has to endure Literally hundreds and hundreds of emails and messages each day threatening her with dire violence. Her apartment’s been broken into. This is really dangerous work, but she stuck to that because she sees it as so important. So you come away from interviewing a person like that.

15:02
You’re very humbled by her courage and her high principles she could leave India, she could find work or a job elsewhere. She’s such an accomplished, skilled journalist. She’s got a brother who lives abroad who’s telling her you don’t have to endure this, come join me. I think he’s in the United States, but she doesn’t. Because she loves India, she wants to stay there. She loves the culture, she loves the place. But she can’t live there and keep quiet because that would be an act of omission. An act of omission, I believe, is a source of moral injury. And so you see this remarkable moral courage as the antidote to that.

15:36 – Doug (Host)
For more information about any of the topics covered in this episode, check out our show notes at secularleftus. Currently last month, been going on for at least the last two months, or almost two months, there’s been a shooting war going on between the terrorist group Hamas and the state of Israel and, according to a report I saw, nearly 60 journalists have been killed, 90% of them Palestinians. How do you, do you have any tips or how do you think people can get a better understanding how dangerous covering conflicts like this can be? Because, like I said, normally we don’t hear about it unless it’s somebody prominent.

16:21 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Yeah, well, there we are. I mean, the statistics are obviously terrible. You know so many people dying and of course, you realize war is very dangerous. When I started to do my research 20 years back, I very soon learned how dangerous it is for journalists. There was a sense back then, 20 years back when I started my work, that somehow journalists, as independent people, would be immune from it, that they could swan in and out of war zones and emerge unscathed.

16:47
But that’s not the case now, and journalists are very vulnerable. But on the front lines they have to get close to where the news is, and that of course, makes them even more vulnerable. The closer you get to the fighting, the more vulnerable you get, and so it becomes this extremely hazardous profession. And what’s really intriguing about it is that journalists are not trained in violence. They’re not soldiers, they’re not combatants, they’re not firefighters, they don’t have any kind of training that’s going to equip you to go and work in war zones. They’re trained as journalists, they’re trained to write or take photographs, but then they find themselves in the world’s most dangerous places that’s the work environment and the mortality rate can be terrible.

17:31 – Doug (Host)
Yeah, and I think both sides. If it’s a war or some other kind of conflict, they both see the press as being the enemy, even if they’re not yeah.

17:42 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
I think for me, a pivotal change in that, I think, was when the Wall Street journalist, Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and beheaded. Why? Because he was American and because he was Jewish and he saw someone being targeted, not because necessarily that he was a journalist, but because what he represented. And I think that was a fundamental shift in how combatants started to see journalists and that made it even more. I mean, war was always dangerous for journalists, but now you’re targeting someone because of who he is and what he represents and killing him in such a brutal fashion like that, and I think that was a real wake-up call for journalists that this is a very, very dangerous profession.

18:28 – Doug (Host)
And I note in the materials that I looked at before an interview you’ve made a documentary about this same subject before the book you made a documentary about it. Do you plan on building on this book for other projects related to journalism covering conflicts?

18:45 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
You know, given the nature of the way the world is, there’s always going to be another question to answer and, you know, more data to collect, and ultimately, I collect all this data because I’m trying to help journalists. So whatever data I collect, I hand back to the profession. So that’s why I’ve done studies in places like Afghanistan and Syria, iran believe it or not Kenya, mexico, where there was the UNESCO Commission Israel, and all the data that I collect I hand back to the local journalists saying, you know, use it to try and help your colleagues from a psychological perspective.

19:18
The current project that I’m busy with relates to and protesters in Iran who have been wounded by the security services there, and how are they coping with that? And I learned from working with Iranian colleagues that the government, when they target protesters, often fire to blind people. I didn’t know this, but there’s a very high incidence of eye wounds and protesters getting blinded, and so I’ve been looking at that group to try and understand what are the psychological effects of sustaining such a terrible injury. So, unfortunately, there’s no shortage of bad news in this world, with questions that need to be answered around. How are people coping with all of this?

20:10 – Doug (Host)
Now, how do you usually collect your data? Do you actually go in the field or do you do surveys, or I mean, what’s the methodology that you use?

20:20 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
So you know, I sit in my very comfortable office at the University of Toronto, far away from trouble, and I don’t go into war zones. But for me to do a study in a country, I partner with local journalists there. So the first thing that I want to establish links. So, for example, when I was doing my work in Mexico, which was the UNESCO commission, they were really concerned about journalists covering the drug violence in Mexico and what effect was it having on journalists. So for me to make a study like that happen, I couldn’t do it from my office in Toronto. I had to go to Mexico, I had to meet with Mexican journalists, I had to discuss what I wanted to do, I had to get them to partner with me and that became the key to collecting the data. You know I can’t travel to data places. I’m not going to travel to Gaza right now to try and collect data for a study but I would partner with local journalists to try and collect their data.

21:13
That’s how we got some data from Afghanistan. I, just before the collapse of the government, I partnered with NGOs in Afghanistan that focused on journalists and, working with Afghan colleagues, we were able to flex on fascinating data on Afghan journalists, and so, as long as I work with local people and I’m sensitive to the pressure that they’re under, I’m acutely sensitive to the cultural nuances of different societies and how people perceive trauma and how they perceive me I don’t want to be this guy parachuting and telling people what’s good for them. I’m there to try and collect what I think is good quality data with the aim of hopefully improving the psychological wellbeing of journalists and to that end, by the way, I’ve started a non-for-profit fund that can provide therapy to freelance journalists who can’t afford psychotherapy.

22:07 – Doug (Host)
That sounds good. It sounds like a real good effort on your part. I appreciate that People that listen to this podcast are very familiar with the compliant corporate-owned media that we have here in the States that cover politics like a sporting event instead of having serious policy-based discussion. I’m assuming you believe all journalists should have moral courage to break out of that right. I mean, all journalists should not be so compliant.

22:35 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Yeah, I don’t think journalists should be holding to outside interests. I think you need to get this story unfettered by pressures outside pressures, whether they’re from politicians or from big business, et cetera. I think that’s essential. If you’re going to have a free trust, you’ve got to be completely independent of these kind of interests, otherwise it will be a bias.

22:57 – Doug (Host)
I know this is probably a similar question to what we talked about a little while ago, but why do you think authoritarians like Donald Trump attack the press when they need them to get their message out?

23:11 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Yeah, because they learn. They learn from the playbook of dictatorial leaders elsewhere. Trump admires Putin, he admires Orban in Hungary. He admires Oduan in Turkey. These are the strong men, the big men, rulers, who do not want a free, democratic press because you can’t control that. The authoritarian leaders want to control everything, absolutely everything. They know it’s good for everybody. They’re the arbiters of everything. They understand that if you want to control society, you need to control the media, because the media has such a powerful voice. That’s part of the playbook of people like Putin and Orban and Oduan. They work very, very hard to undermine the press In Russia. They destroyed the press, the press in places like Turkey under tremendous pressure from Oduan.

24:03
That’s a NATO member right. That’s a country where journalists are having a dreadful time. The journalist profile in my book hand-under Turkish has put a tremendous price for his courageous reporting because Oduan didn’t like him and he called out many egregious things that he took his government to. Someone like Trump looks at that. He says we’ve got the playbook over here. This is how we control the media. You borrow from it and you learn from it. Those kind of undemocratic principles start seeping into our own countries in the United States, maybe Canada, United Kingdom, etc. Because strong men, strong rulers like that. That’s, I think, one of the wake-up courts where a book like this it’s not just about what’s going down in Belarus or Russia or Azerbaijan. It’s wake-up because these kind of things coming to our society not in you from these kind of malign influences.

24:58 – Doug (Host)
Besides that, seeing how the danger of authoritarian against the press are, what else do you want to see people get out of reading your book?

25:11 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
People want, I think, just an appreciation of who these journalists are, this remarkable work that they do, to understand that journalism is so important. It’s a fundamental building block of civil society that we can’t take it for granted. We can look to these individuals and these far-fung places as model. Individuals, people to you… are making a considerable sacrifice to sustain, as I say, the last vestiges of democracy in the country. So we admire them, but we can learn from them as well. There’s a learning message over here. We shouldn’t be complacent. The kind of forces that have undermined democracy in Turkey, india, places that we consider some people still consider democratic. We have to be careful of that, because in our own societies we’re not immune from those forces.

26:07 – Doug (Host)
And I think here too, one of the problems that we have here in the United States is the influence of advertising and how some advertisers can get particular stories killed. You know, if it doesn’t show them in a good light, either they could sue a media property or a journalist, or they can influence the owners to not broadcast it.

26:35 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Yeah, no very much. I think when journalists are too close or media organizations are too close to big business, to politicians, you run into tremendous problems. And once again I bring you back to this wonderful example in my book. Come back to Gwen Lister, who worked so hard to get democracy in Namibia, got rid of apartheid, a free country, et cetera. And once democracy had come, the new government, as a sign of appreciation to her, approached her and offered her a job. And she turned it down because she said it’s not good for journalists to be too close to power. They need to be away from that because otherwise, how do you call it for what it is and which? It turned it down?

27:16
It made her life even more complicated because the people who look to her as you’re one of ours, helped us become, helped us get into power, became suspicious of her. Why don’t you want this position? We’re offering you a job, you can get financial security, you can get all sorts of financial inducements from it. And she said no, her moral compass was so strong. She said, no, I’m not gonna do this, I’m still gonna keep my complete independence as a journalist. And that, for me, is such a wonderful observation to see that all the inducements are there would have been so easy to say I’ve labored very hard, I’ve had a tremendous price for working, personal price for getting it as far. Would have been very easy to say, okay, now what are some easier time right, some greater financial security, et cetera. But no, the moral compass remain very true you cannot get close to power, you can’t get close to vested financial interests, because the moment you do so it starts undermining your freedom of expression, starts undermining the message that you put out as a journalist.

28:15 – Doug (Host)
Yeah, and I admire her for that, because a lot of times you see people they do things for the benefit of themselves, and she was doing it for the benefit of everybody, so that’s why she turned it down.

28:32 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Exactly exactly. We come back to your question that you just cannot get too close to vested financial interests, et cetera, and politicians in high places, because they potentially use your objectivity.

28:46 – Doug (Host)
And so what has been more fulfilling for you studying people with multiple sclerosis or covering journalists who have moral courage?

28:56 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Oh, it’s both really. I mean my career’s largely been, I think, defined by my MS work. I mean I’ve run an MS lab now for 30 years. I have to keep it funded, to be getting grants. I employ a lot of people through that. It’s been a big undertaking dealing with a very complex and fascinating disease and my day job largely is multiple sclerosis. We publish a lot and our publications are geared towards trying to change clinical practice to help people with a very disabling disease. So my PhD was in multiple sclerosis work. It’s really been the bedrock of my academic career.

29:39
But my journalism work has been it’s not an afterthought, it’s been a very, very important part of my academic life, but a much smaller part, but one that’s no less meaningful to me. And I think that as I get older, what am I gonna do in terms of my career, et cetera I’m gravitating more towards it because I think, with my knowledge of the profession and looking at the world around me, I believe it’s never been more important to have a vibrant free press and I think journalists are present under tremendous pressure. I’ll give you a practical example. When I did my very first study the one that was funded by the Freedom Forum back in 1999, we had a group of journalists who defined the careers by going to war able war journalists. And then I had a control group of domestic Canadian journalists who stayed at home covering the local news and clearly we showed, you know, war was very dangerous and so because of that, you were more likely to develop PTSD and depression and substance abuse relative to local journalists.

30:41
When I look at local journalists now, 22, 23 years on, what they called on to do is fundamentally different from what it was 20 years back. There’s the Black Lives Matter movement in Canada that has murdered a missing Indigenous woman a very painful story in Canadian society. There’s the climate change journalism, which is enormously difficult. Communities that are getting destroyed, people are losing everything their homes, loved ones, et cetera.

31:09
You know domestic journalists are moving from one crisis to another and they’re doing it against the backdrop of social media, which is so malignant. People are targeting them relentlessly with harassment and messages of hate and violence. So domestic journalists now are having a much harder time over, I believe, than they had 20 years back. And so I think you know media is hard to be a journalist today. It can be a very difficult, challenging profession because of these reasons, and so when I look at my journalism work, I hope that it’s making a difference to help individuals like this, because, I come back to saying it time and time again it’s such an important pillar of free society You’ve got to have a free, vibrant and healthy press.

31:50 – Doug (Host)
All right, dr Feinstein, I really appreciate you joining us today. And again, the title of your book is Moral Courage 19 Profiles of Investigative Journalists, and it is available, as we say, at your favorite bookseller. It’s also available online, and, again, I really do appreciate you joining us today.

32:09 – Dr. Anthony Feinstein (Guest)
Yeah, thank you so much for your time and interest. I enjoy talking to you.

32:15 – Doug (Host)
Thank you for listening to this episode. You can check out more information, including links to sources used in our show notes, on our website at secularleftus. Secular Left is hosted, written and produced by Doug Berger and he is solely responsible for the content. Send us your comments either using the contact form on the website or by sending us a note at comments at secularleftus. Our theme music is dank and nasty, composed using Amplify Studio. See you next time