Mort Report is a labor of love by old-style correspondents with lifetimes on the road and young ones with fresh eyes. Our philosophy is simple: we report at first hand with analysis based on non-alternative fact, not opinion. If we get something wrong, we fix it.
PARIS — A headline in Le Monde over a chilling photo spread stopped me cold. It read: "We're buying time, but we won't win the fight; Senegal's Saint-Louis faces the inexorable rise of the sea." Oh lord, I thought, déjà vu all over again.
I am not much of a Hemingway fan, but his tale of old Santiago finally wrestling in a giant marlin and then struggling back to port with only a skeleton savaged by sharks turns out to be the perfect metaphor for what we hapless humans are now up against.
For me, it hits home hard. After 40 years of trying to report on what now threatens to be the most crucial global story ever, I've come up with bare bones. Overfishing and sea change are vastly complex issues. Yet few people care about what they can't see.
Reporting focuses mostly on shipboard slavery, brutality and crime. All are important, but they miss the main point. The ocean that sustains us all is rising and dying.
In 2014, The New York Times Magazine sent me to do a cover story from Senegal, already a stark vignette of the big picture. The editor liked my draft and asked for more. But a staff shakeup replaced him. Younger editors wanted more human drama and less fish.
By the time my story was spiked many months later, it was too outdated to take elsewhere. I kept at it in other ways, including a book proposal and an attempt to form a small cluster of specialized reporters. A generous foundation grant helped a lot.
Finally, I decided that old men and the sea are also an endangered species. I'm only a parttime piker with a small hook. Yet even David Attenborough's spectacular new film, "Ocean," his swan song at age 99, sank beneath the waves after its flurry of acclaim.
It includes some of the most sickening footage I've ever seen. Submerged cameras follow trawler nets on steel cables that scrape the ocean floor at high speed, ripping away breeding grounds, rich ancient coral beds and every sea creature in their path.
“It’s hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish,” Attenborough says. “Over three quarters of a trawler’s catch may be thrown away.” Large fleets heavily subsidized by governments are destroying Earth's most valuable common resource.
This is a saga of many parts, and I'll tell it as it unfolded, Papa Hemingway-style. But first, the backdrop.
BAYEUX, France — Each October this medieval gem of a town by those Normandy beaches takes stock of global realities that so many people refuse to see. The view has never been bleaker as a heedless world sleepwalks toward endgame.
Still, Bayeux is bulwark of sanity, a time capsule with a clear view of the present. Elders and kids alike fortify hope for a planet in urgent need of saving itself. I come up every year for recharge at the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy War Correspondent Prizes.
Time remains to snap awake and act. Yet nothing will change without trusted firsthand honest reporting about what is going wrong — and why.
Our jury of 40 includes reporters fresh from warfronts and forgotten places where people quietly suffer and die. We select words and images that fit human detail into broad context. Meantime, we learn from a thoughtful public how we can do better.
Correspondents mingle with more than 15,000 teenagers who ask probing questions before awarding their own prizes. Schoolkids mob photo exhibits and a huge tent for nightly insights and onscreen projections that reveal why war is hell.
Bayeux's cathedral houses the first newsreel, an embroidered tapestry that depicts the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066. That sparked a thousand years of territorial warfare, now splintered into countless brutal conflicts.
Allied troops from the opposite direction stopped a malignant narcissist from turning democracy into despotism. Hitler's aim was ethnically purified societies ruled by big money with a perverse hypocritical version of Christianity.
Now there is Donald Trump. No Führer, he is a pathetic, sick manchild who grabs whatever catches his eye with no regard for others. Still, he uses the same big-lie racialist tactics to inflame the gullible and greedy with blood-libel distortions.
For the first time in my 14 years on the jury, grim reflection dimmed the late-night partying. So many faux journalists get things wrong, inadvertently or on purpose, that real ones question whether it is still worth wading into the thick of things.
It is. Yet American news organizations are cutting back. Elsewhere, foreign correspondents are a dying breed, literally as well as figuratively.
