in praise of Mona Chalabi
a good journalist, by Peter Maurin's standards
“‘After all, you’re not a real Catholic, not like the political Catholics I have met.’ another young woman said to me recently in Lancaster. I can only say, ‘I am a daughter of the Church,’ repeating the words of St. Teresa of Avila. It is as a daughter of the Church that I do these things [attend the Communist Convention]. I might add as a working journalist also, and the two are not in opposition, muddied as our motives often are.”
— Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, March 1957
“To tell everybody that a man died leaving two million dollars, may be journalism; but it is not good journalism. But to tell everybody that the man died leaving two million dollars because he did not know how to take them with him by paying a just wage, and by giving them to the poor for Christ’s sake during his lifetime, is good journalism.
— Peter Maurin, “The Thinking Journalist” The Catholic Worker, May 1939
2023 was a big year for Mona Chalabi. In May, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her illustrations in the New York Times Magazine’s April 2022 issue depicting Jeff Bezos’ wealth. Her illustrations are funny and whimsical in a dark, satirical manner, and they are a Pulitzer-worthy subject. Jeff Bezos is wealthy in biblically obscene proportions. He is so wealthy that it is extremely hard to actually wrap your mind around how wealthy. And, although we tend to believe that hoarding wealth is a socially neutral reality, Chalbi’s work challenges that assumption. And prompts the question of what we’re all losing because Jeff Bezos does not know how to take his billions with him into death by giving them away.
Chalabi’s illustrations compare Bezos’ wealth in measures of weight, length (if the median U.S. household’s wealth is the length of a white blood cell, by comparison, his is the length of a finback whale—that’s 10 micrometers to 66 feet), the height of a piece of Toblerone compared to five-times the height of Everest, and time: “The average full-time Amazon employee made $37,930 in 2020,” she writes. “In order to accumulate as much money as Bezos…an employee would have had to start working in the Pliocene Epoch (4.5 million years ago).”
Chalabi notes how little of Bezos’ fortune he has given away — 1.2% of his wealth. If he gave away just one-third of his fortune (leaving two-thirds of his almost $200 billion dollars for himself) he could give each one of Amazon’s 1.6 million employees a $1,000 bonus, for a year, he could give free pre-school to every child in the United States, provide free public transit to all New Yorkers, and supply insulin to the 38 million Americans diagnosed with diabetes; he could make emergency repairs to all of the U.S. bridges and roads in need and he could feed the 13.8 million households who are food-insecure in America for one month.
Chalabi revealed, after the Pulitzer ceremony, that she had entered the piece herself to the Pulitzer Prizes, because she knew the New York Times would not enter it themselves. (The box on the form that asked if Jake Silverstein, editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine, had approved this submission? She simply checked yes “I lied,” she said.)
A decade ago, Bezos bought The Washington Post. Earlier this month, The Washington Post announced that it was going to be exploring how to integrate artificial intelligence into its newsroom as part of its strategy to “pivot” after suffering a $77 million loss last year.
James pointed out that $77 million, to Bezos, is “like a quarter lost in the couch or a few bucks in the washer.” Bezos’ bought The Post, he said, because the institution “has an incredibly important role to play in this democracy.” If he really believed that, James pointed out, Bezos could pour money into the newsroom without a problem, because:
A $77 million loss is 0.77% of Bezos’ $10 Billion in cash.
A $77 million loss is 0.42% of Bezos’ $183 Billion in assets.
A $77 million loss is 0.39% of Bezos’ $193 Billion in assets and cash.1
It seems that Bezos does not care so much about funding democratic reporting if he cannot even pour less than 1% of his fortune into it.
Chalabi, on the other hand, gave her $15,000 prize money—I do not know what percent of her fortune this is, but, given that she is a freelance journalist, I would imagine it’s much more than 1%—from Columbia University to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. At least 107 Palestinian journalists have been killed in the war, and an additional 350 cases of killings, injuries, and arrests are being investigated.
The Pulitzer Prize Ceremony took place less than two weeks after October 7, 2023. On October 7, 2023, 250 Israelis were killed and 230 Palestinians. By October 19, when the Pulitzer Ceremony was held in New York City, 3,785 Palestinians had been killed, including at least 1,524 children, according to the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The Pulitzer Prize ceremony, Chalabi said, was extremely emotional for her, especially in the framing of October 7 and the Israeli retribution following. “The reporting on Palestine right now fundamentally shows a disdain for Arab life,” she said. “I left crying,” she said, before the ceremony was over and went to a nearby dive bar. "I just kept on thinking about Palestinian journalists right now," she said in an interview one month later. "It was so incongruous knowing that I was dressed up and I have colleagues in Palestine who are literally getting bombed."
The same day as the Pulitzer Prize ceremony, Chalabi posted her first graphic illustrating this disdain for Palestinian lives. She published a graphic on her Instagram on the New York Times’ coverage of Israel and Palestine. Mentions of Israeli deaths, she noted, far outstrip Palestinian deaths, which were exponentially higher.
Chalabi had originally pitched this graphic to the New York Times, who had reached out to her asking for a contribution, since, the editor said, their coverage had been focused on Israeli casualties and their side. Chalabi pitched this graphic, one on displacement, and one on U.S. support for the Israeli military—all of which she eventually posted on her Instagram.
The editor admitted those pieces were going to be a tough sell. She asked Chalabi instead for a human-interest piece on witnessing the violence as an Arab journalist. But Chalabi rebuffed that idea, despite the healthy paycheck. She didn’t want to do opinion pieces, she said, when the problems are grounded in facts: in the crossing universally-held moral lines for the purposes of destroying innocent human beings.
Although Chalabi criticized the Times, Chalabi felt grateful for the Gray Lady. “I genuinely feel like I can do some of my best work [at The Times],” she said. She noted what all journalists seek from institutions: good editors, who make your work better than a blog post, good fact-checkers, a community that takes your ideas and makes it shine. The best work is made together.
She has not received a commission from The Times since. Chalabi said she was late to the Pulizter Ceremony because she wanted to publish her graphic before the ceremony, during which she accepted an award for work done at The Times (work which adds to the New York Times’ count of Pulitzer prizes).
The value of journalism is the value of the comment given with the news. To be a good journalist is to say something interesting about interesting things or interesting people. The news is the occasion for the journalist to convey his thinking to unthinking people.
— Peter Maurin, “The Thinking Journalist” The Catholic Worker, May 1939
When I finished my journalism degree at Columbia University, James gave me Peter Maurin’s Easy Essay “The Thinking Journalist” as a graduation gift. (It was not the last Easy Essay I have gotten as a gift….as we began, so we continue.) After a year of having journalistic objectivity drilled into our heads, I remember being troubled by Maurin’s essay.
In the middle of that year, I remember talking to a classmate from theology school about the differences in the modes in which the journalist and the theologian pursue truth. “I’ve never thought so much about if what I say is true ever before in my life,” I said. Which is ironic, after six years of studying theology, to finally wonder if what I say is “true.”
“You can’t wash yourself of the consequences of your work,” said Mona Chalabi in an interview about her Pulitzer and the ceremony.
Journalism, of course, cannot dictate a community’s norms. It’s only as useful insofar as the community shares normative values. If you believe that coercive force can be used by the state for the purposes of the state, then you will not read an article about the police the same way someone who believes in a truly democratic society will (in a true democracy, police cannot exist. To exert force on anyone would to be declare them an outsider in the democracy, unequal to those inside the polis. That’s what is generally call a military—those members vested by the state with the power to kill those outside the state for the purposes of the state).
But journalism can’t create those values. The tools of reporting are not equipped to discern what is “good” and what is “bad.” Those discernments have to take place outside of and prior to the story. They’re something, certainly, that theology is concerned with. Theology is much more concerned with what is goodness and how we know it is good. And, perhaps, in an academic setting, the emphasis is on the quality of one’s insights: what do you have to add to this millennia-long conversation of humanity’s search for God?
That is lovely, as long as you never leave the safe confines of a community who agrees with you. Once you step outside the ivory tower—or, perhaps, just outside of your department!—how do you dialogue with a world that has no longer been shaped by those same normative values? What value can your insights bring to a world that does not speak the same language?
Of course, Maurin does not have to be right about everything—no one is—but as a perceptive thinker who is very right about many things, I take his comments on journalism seriously, even if they are not to be followed like scripture.
I think what Maurin is calling for is a sort of synthesis of both ways of thinking: of cultivating insight into God, and what it means to be of God—to be good—and also of being curious about the world, to read, to learn, to absorb the news outside of the small circle of one’s comfortable convictions.
I don’t know if journalistic objectivity is real, or if it’s mostly an invention of corporate newspaper companies, which are, of course, dying, because the rich men who have gotten rich off the sweat of 1.5 million workers’ brows can’t bother to give less than 1% of their fortune to save them.
But the craft of reporting: of asking questions, listening, and seeking out data to paint a conclusion rather than relying on your own preconceived notions is, of course, quite real—and essential. But I sometimes wonder if it is any materially different than the practice of rigorous thinking, something we are in a drought of.
Which is why I often flip through the pages of The Catholic Worker, because it is a newspaper that clearly knows what it is: a Catholic newspaper, and knows what its normative values are: the Sermon on the Mount, the encyclicals of the Popes, Catholic Social Teaching. Its first 50 years or so is an absolute explosion of creativity. Famous names appear in each issue: it’s a treasure chest of Catholic history. It covers action with thought.
In the absence of institutions and publications that mirror The Catholic Worker’s thinking journalism, we at least have thinking journalists, like Mona Chalabi.
Since October, Chalabi’s Instagram page has become a repository of data on Palestine and the violence in Gaza. She has illuminated the torture of Palestinian prisoners, the bombing of civilians and how the dates of key Israeli attacks happen on large holidays in the United States:
It’s a high-wire act of journalism, to self-publish her data illustrations on topics that matter so much without the support of an institution. “I’m so terrified of being wrong,” she said—the mantra of any journalist worth their salt.
“Why was so much done in remedying social evils instead of avoiding them in the first place? ... Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to slaves but to do away with slavery?”
— Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
Numbers updated (this is why we need fact checkers)! And Jeff Bezos’ wealth fluctuates, sometimes day to day.