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.
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.
PARIS — Almeria took four days to limp up the Seine to the boatyard last year. She just blasted back home in two. At 15 knots, less than school-zone speed limits, I kicked back with a pipe and a pile of books for a 100-mile voyage that spanned 2,000 years.
There were moments. A rib-bruising fall through a hatch slowed me down on the ropes. We again encountered the Auxerrois, a working barge that saved us on the trip up last year and nearly sank us on the way down. Lockkeepers declared a surprise strike.
Still, my old wooden boat is back at its mooring in the heart of Paris after a major refit, ready for another century afloat. In fact, as things look today, Almeria may outlive us all. I wish that was only literary license.
We dumbass humans are losing our wondrous world at breakneck speed, heedless of universal truths dating to Antiquity.
For an hour on the first morning two of us stood in the bow peering into fog so thick it blotted out the water beneath us, let alone obstacles ahead. As the current carried us along, I reflected on the rudderless big raft we all share with no one charting our course.
