Your ELi: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

During this week’s bloom of Je suis Charlie, in the wake of the murders at France’s satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, I got to wondering whether Eli is Charlie. The simplest answer, of course, is “no.” Much to the disappointment of our astronomy reporter who would dearly love to write satire about what goes on in East Lansing city politics, we don’t accept satire. Satire is editorial, and ELi is nonpartisan and non-editorial.

Yet I was not alone in thinking about Charlie’s relationship to ELi. I talked about it with at least four contributors to ELi this week. One of our calendar editors shared an editorial cartoon I would have loved to reproduce. It showed for “yesterday,” a pencil; for “today,” a pencil broken in two; and for “tomorrow,” the two parts of the pencil transformed into two pencils. The clear message: Break us and we just grow stronger.

But again, it’s an editorial cartoon—a comment on freedom of the press, freedom of expression. So I could not reproduce it at ELi (even if I got permission).

But then I got to wondering further: Is that editorial? Is the statement that “if you try to break free expression in a democracy, free expression will only grow stronger” an opinion, or is it an historical fact?

A few years ago someone burned a copy of the Koran outside the East Lansing Islamic Center. The reaction? While the police investigated, many people of the City, including the East Lansing Area Clergy Association, arranged visible shows of support for the Islamic Center and its members. Challenge free expression, and you get more of it—as that broken-pencil cartoon suggested. A fact?

I founded ELi in part out of that kind of broken-pencil experience. I was working on my forthcoming book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (to be published by Penguin Press this March), noting how the economic collapse of investigative journalism in this country has compounded problems in the areas of social justice and free scholarly inquiry. I started to think about how, in East Lansing, the absence of an East Lansing-focused, nonpartisan, non-editorial press meant that people here could not know what is really going on. The thought eventually led to founding ELi as a nonprofit corporation, and launching this past fall.

The Founding Fathers put freedom of the press in the very first amendment to the Constitution. They knew that without free flow of ideas and information, one could not really have meaningful democracy. The founders of modern democratic France knew the same.

Sometimes when I ask people who value ELi, “Why don’ t you donate financially or contribute reporting?”, the answer is, essentially, “It’s not my job.”

As ELi’s publisher and chief City government reporter—as an American looking at the suffering and the outrage in France—I’m meditating on that a lot this week. Whose job is it to do the uncomfortable, hard, often thankless work that undergirds liberté, egalité, fraternité? The fraternity of citizen-reporters and donors who make up ELi clearly think its theirs.