I SURPRISED SOME FOLKS, EVIDENTLY. During my regular public radio version of this column last week, I reacted very negatively — and some people said uncharacteristically — to one disturbing aspect of President Joe Biden’s Middle East trip.  

I was speaking with my colleague Marshall Miles of the NPR station, WHDD, broadcasting live as usual on Friday morning, between the ending of Biden’s Israel visit and his arrival in Saudi Arabia. I found myself railing against the way that two journalists’ appalling deaths were being sidelined, supposedly in the interests of international diplomacy.

I refer of course to the recent shooting death of Al Jazeera’s veteran reporter, the Palestinian-American Shireen Abu Akleh, while she was covering a raid by Israeli forces into the West Bank. Angry Palestinians claim an Israeli shooter killed her, in a criminal act of deliberate targeting. After the bullet that killed her was handed to the US embassy, US authorities concluded that Israeli gunfire was “likely responsible for the death” of the journalist. This barely rated a mention in reports of the top table talks at Jerusalem’s Waldorf-Astoria.

And in the other case, nearly four years have passed since the horrifically gruesome killing of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside Saudi diplomatic premises. In that time the US intelligence community has become substantially more clear in assigning blame. Last year Biden’s own appointee as Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, concluded:

“We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”

That operation, as we know all too well, ended in Khashoggi being killed and dismembered by the Saudi agents working to the Crown Prince’s orders.

We can all recall Biden as candidate for President then calling the Saudis a “pariah” nation. And yet the recent oil-price crisis ushered in by Vladimir’s Putin‘s invasion of Ukraine has inexcusably made him change his mind. Or as some Administration sources who brief journalists on Biden’s behalf sometimes ludicrously say, “his thinking has evolved.” The Saudis need to be cultivated, it’s now claimed, in order to stabilize oil prices (which now happen to be falling from their recent highs, for however long that might be).

I know that my ire is especially engaged by the two victims in these cases being fellow journalists. But as I said on-air, you don’t have to be a reporter feeling solidarity with others in our trade to be thoroughly appalled, indeed disgusted, by Biden’s position.

IN UKRAINE’S DEFENSIVE WAR against Putin’s aggression, the Kyiv Post reports that 33 media workers have now been killed. And of course that number is rising.

Meanwhile in Russia journalism is being suppressed in characteristic Putinesque style, often violently so. It’s his inevitable attempt to keep Russians in the dark about everything being perpetrated in their name.

Occasionally, though, bright lights will illuminate Russia’s landscape of blackout, misinformation and disinformation. One especially notable light was until now, like many others, in the process of being extinguished: the online television station Dozhd.

Its name means simply ‘Rain’ in Russian, and I can’t help recalling that Shakespeare compared “the quality of mercy” (a quality in short supply under Putin) to “the gentle rain from heaven.” The station’s website was blocked by authorities soon after the invasion began. Then only this week its chief editor, Tikhon Dzyadko, said concerns for their personal safety had forced him and several other Dozhd journalists to make a timely escape from Russia.

However, in this same week, news comes of the station re-starting its work. The neighboring country of Latvia, no stranger to Russia’s bullying, expansionist ways, has granted Dohzd a broadcasting license.  The station’s programing will now be beamed into Russia from studios not only in Latvia but also in France, Holland and even Georgia, to where more and more Russians who object to the war have reportedly been relocating..

In Europe’s turbulent world of wartime communications, Dozhd’s bold efforts to reconnect with its audience may seem a small drop in a huge ocean, but they deserve applause. The deaths of Khashoggi and Abu Akleh remind us of how hard it can often be – and how high the price can be – to uphold freedom of the press.