The new organization will be governed by a board representing local and national leaders in journalism, philanthropy, and business, including chair Monica Lozano, former editor, publisher and CEO of La Opinión; Kevin Merida, former executive editor of the L.A. Times; Giselle Fernandez, Emmy-award winning anchor at Spectrum News; Gerun Riley, president of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation; and Michael Ouimette, chief investment officer of the American Journalism Project.

“The coalition of media organizations, philanthropies, and individuals who’ve come together to revitalize local news in Los Angeles are building toward a future where we have a resilient, sustainable, independent local press that holds decision makers to account, and equips all Angelenos to thrive and engage in their communities,” says Lozano.

Joining this initiative will help Zócalo continue to deliver on our mission to provide journalism and public programming in a broad-minded, accessible spirit.

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Last year was the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere. Earth’s ocean surfaces were warmer in the first month of 2024 than any previously recorded January. And by the end of this year, global climate-related deaths since 2000 could exceed 4 million people, according to one estimate.

The immediacy and the stakes of human-driven climate change have never been clearer. Yet journalists reporting on climate-driven disasters are still pulling punches in their coverage. They often don’t explicitly invoke climate change in their reporting, and even more rarely do they identify the primary culprit behind it: the human consumption of fossil fuels, egged on by oil and gas companies that have long known better.

Journalists cherish their performance of neutrality when reporting on controversial issues. But this commitment to appearing “balanced”—even when one side is relying on evidence and the other is making things up—has come at a profound cost. It’s led major news outlets to cover what should be the science story of our time through the lens of politics, resulting in a delayed, diminutive planetary response to the once slowly, and now rapidly, accelerating climate emergency.

Journalistic neutrality posits that it’s possible to approach a news story without filtering choices through some system of values: about what’s right and wrong, true and false, important and trivial, “normal” and deviant. But this long-held reporting norm is a fallacy. Contemporary media critics such as Jay Rosen and Lewis Raven Wallace have aptly argued that all communication originates in “a view from somewhere”: We are inevitably influenced by our experiences, our families, our peers, and our moral commitments, and it’s more productive to recognize and acknowledge these commitments than to delude ourselves or (as journalists often do) over-represent views we find harmful just to demonstrate impartiality.

Right-wing actors have weaponized the fear of being labeled “biased” to manipulate reporting by insisting on “both sides” treatment that offers equally credulous depictions of crystal-clear science and cynical “skeptics.” Reporters who are believed to have crossed a line into opinion or “advocacy” can lose prestige, or even their jobs, by not adequately acquiescing to an elusive and idealized standard of neutrality. This has led journalists to violate their own sense of morality or legitimize movements of which they are rightfully skeptical in their coverage. Veteran environmental journalist Amy Westervelt has spoken about this on her groundbreaking “Drilled” podcast: “I myself have had editors remove mentions of climate science from a story about worsening wildfires because they don’t want to ‘make the story political.’”

A late-20th century campaign exploiting this neutrality norm through well-promoted pseudo-science and supporting rhetoric from fossil fuel-friendly politicians prompted journalists to waste years tepidly “balancing” empirical truths about rising climate risks against bad-faith claims that climate change was a “hoax” or conspiracy. Max Boykoff, a leading scholar in exposing these patterns, found in one study of climate coverage from 1995 to 2004 that journalists’ failures to clearly portray the scientific consensus “have led to the appearance of amplified uncertainty and debate, also then permeating public and policy discourse.”

Journalists now face an ethical choice that affects the fate of life on Earth: Do they stick with the vaunted value of “neutrality” and keep balancing good-faith climate communication with bad-faith, debunked denialism? Or do they cover the climate emergency as an increasingly urgent fact and mitigate the muddle that has plagued our public discourse?

Inspiration for an alternative path can be found in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. This widely influential code, revised in 2014 by the century-old organization representing journalists in the U.S., offers four main principles: Seek Truth and Report It, Act Independently, Be Accountable and Transparent, and Minimize Harm.

In the context of climate change, the directive to minimize harm is the most overlooked. This tenet has guided journalists through many discrete cases where the safety, well-being, and privacy of individual news sources are at stake. Protecting a sexual assault victim’s identity, for instance, might mean being less transparent and delivering less truth than would naming that victim. In such cases, journalists generally err on the side of minimizing harm.

Yet because the mandate to minimize harm is narrowly interpreted to focus on individual sources and subjects, its highest potential is largely untapped. Journalists’ much broader obligation to minimize harm—by considering the safety and well-being of communities, societies, and the very planet that sustains life and journalistic work – has been almost entirely neglected.

Climate change is perhaps the most compelling case for applying a broader interpretation of the principle to minimize harm: favoring evidence over equivalence and making coverage choices that starkly clarify the stakes of continued inaction.

Scientists have recently warned that averting global catastrophe will require a radical restructuring of economic and social life on Earth — an astonishing statement that calls into question nearly every element of our daily lives. But while this warning was duly reported, it has barely interrupted the largely episodic nature of climate coverage in mainstream media, which continues to look from day to day as though we weren’t on the precipice of irrevocable disaster.

The historian Howard Zinn famously said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” As the train of humanity barrels toward a potentially unlivable world, anyone who’s not trying to slow it down might as well be driving it.

There’s only one way for journalists to minimize harm around climate change—and that’s to fight it.

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My ability to be neutral as a political journalist depends on the intellectual honesty of the people—and the society—I cover.

But in an era when one side of the political spectrum is not always operating in good faith, and when people in my position are increasingly losing the trust of the audiences we serve, I don’t think neutrality should be the final goal. Instead, perhaps, we should think about neutrality more as a means to an end: uncovering the truth, without fear or favor, and presenting that truth to the public.

The dictionary defines being neutral as, “not aligned with or supporting any side or position in a controversy.” There are certainly aspects of my job where this is core to the work, such as in reporting, where being neutral means asking open-ended questions and dispassionately following facts, wherever they may lead.

Take criminal justice policy, one of the most challenging beats that I have ever covered. When I began reporting on the topic 15 years ago, California was grappling with prisons so crowded that, eventually, the U.S Supreme Court stepped in and ordered the state to reduce the populations.

This record incarceration was the result of a “tough on crime” movement that correlated safety with long prison sentences. But that correlation wasn’t borne out by the facts: People were receiving decades-long sentences for drug possession or property crimes, taking state funding away from schools and other core state services. California also had a very high recidivism rate, meaning most people who were released from prison would quickly return—but it often wasn’t for a new violent crime, rather for a simple violation of their parole rules.

I felt it was crucial to tell this story from all angles—and not just from the perspective of crime victims or law enforcement, who had dominated the discussion during the “tough on crime” era. I wanted to capture the points of view of the people who were incarcerated, and their families and communities who were impacted by their crimes and the punishment meted out. I tried to center my reporting not just on anecdotes but on data and research—even if that research did not comport with widely accepted assumptions and beliefs.

It was not always popular to do so, even with my editors, who were used to relying on conventional sources and well-worn narratives. Now, a decade or so into the reforms sparked by the prison overcrowding crisis—and as we face new challenges around property crimes and drug use—I am digging back into this issue to assess whether the reforms worked, or if they are to blame for the problems so evident in California.

I don’t yet know what I will find. But I do know that my job is to report it, no matter who likes or dislikes the findings.

Eventually, I’ll come to the point in my work when I have to leave neutrality behind and seek objectivity. Once I have answered the questions that I set out to ask, I have to make a call about what I found.

That doesn’t mean taking a side in the political sense. It means taking the side of the truth.

This can be a challenge in itself. It’s particularly hard when you are interviewing someone on live TV or radio, where you must push back against falsehoods in real time. Recently, we had U.S Senate candidate Eric Early, someone who believes that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, on my radio show.

This is not an intellectually honest argument to make, even if many Americans agree with it: The facts don’t bear out. So, when I am in the studio with Early in that moment, it’s not my job to stay “neutral” and simply listen. It’s my job to question, to push back—and, yes, call out the lies when they are uttered. It doesn’t have to be confrontational or uncivil, but it is key to doing my job responsibly.

This is where objectivity becomes key—the ability to set aside personal feelings or opinions and look at the facts, then make a judgment based on that information. Neutrality alone—the idea of not aligning yourself with one side—doesn’t cut it when you’re faced with someone who is lying, obfuscating, or being intellectually dishonest, even if they believe what they’re saying. But it’s also a mistake to see objectivity in this kind of situation as taking a side, other than the side of the truth.

Because the role of a journalist is to seek, uncover, and broadcast the truth. Without fear or favor. Without my own beliefs getting in the way. Even if, in this moment, it is harder than ever.

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I walked by Billy Hearst’s old headquarters in L.A.’s stinking downtown, chatting up the bums and streetwalkers. Turned out I was married to one of the gals back in ’02, but neither of us remembered much about it.

Then, while dodging dog poop on Broadway, I ran into that rare species of homo sapiens: an editor. Felt sorry for her immediately. She’s doing a years-long sentence, without possibility of parole, editing the dull intellectual scribbler whose high-minded copy usually occupies this space. His drivel might as well be a balloon of lead. (And I ain’t talking about the hot kind of lead that Dirty Harry shot at, lucky punks.)

I asked her to go with me for a drink, right then and there. After one or three bebidas, we agreed to evict that bastard Joe from this space right away.

Now you’ve got me as your columnist. Go ahead and applaud.

You, the bored readers of the previous columnist’s twaddle, deserve something spicier, like a Szechuan-Yucatan burrito. You deserve a voice that speaks your language, that reminds you what you already know, and tells you what to hear—all the things most people want in a column these days.

You don’t need some pointy-headed Pasadena teetotaler telling you what he thinks you should know about, rather than what you want to know. You don’t want to be stuck with some columnist who pontificates about Polish literature, French philosophy, or—I thought he’d never stop—participatory democracy.

In these political times, you need a columnist whose allegiances are dependable. You could never tell whether my snot-nosed predecessor was a Democrat, a Republican, an independent, or a Ukrainian Green. Maybe he himself didn’t know. People also want a columnist who speaks not just for himself but for a gender, a race, an ethnicity, or a demographic. The previous columnist might be Scots-Irish or Okie or Creek Indian or Chinese or not even American at all—I never could really follow.

All his misdirection was exhausting.

And you can retweet that, porfas.

Unlike the other guy, I’m one of you. I didn’t go to Harvard or a snotty private school across the street from Caltech. I cut my teeth on the streets of Bakersfield. You won’t catch me reading anything but paperback mysteries—I’m a sportsman and a hustler, though since I got some bank and hang with pretty people, they call me a philanthropist.

I’m the sort of the character that, if reporter-types ever wanted to represent the voice of John Q. Public, they’d have to invent me.

I decided to reclaim these precious column inches after seeing a funny little flick called American Fiction. Caught it at a matinee at the Maya, which you really should check out next time you’re speeding up 99 through Kern County. Movie is about a lost-up-his-own-butt type, a professor-writer named Monk. He’s Black but otherwise, he reminds me of your former columnist—he writes books about aesthetics and ideas that no one would ever read.

Then he gets drunk and gets wise and writes a real-world book, about a Black man named Stagg R. Leigh who is running from the law. It’s fiction, but he passes it off as real. That’s the kind of thing editors say I can never do in a column.

He first calls the book My Pafology. But then he decides to change it to something simpler, F—k. That inspired me to rename this column. What the hell did “Connecting California” mean? First I thought to go with “Streets of Bakersfield,” as homage to Buck and Merle. But during an afternoon at my local cannabis lounge, I decided to call it “California S—t.” More fitting.

American Fiction got five more Oscar nominations than the old version of this column, which never won anything better than third place at the LA Press Club. Most of it takes place in Boston, but it goes back to L.A. when this Hollywood producer Wiley, played by that sweet Jewish kid from The O.C., decides to make F—k into his latest film (his last two were called Middle Passage and Plantation Annihilation). Wiley spent a month in jail on a drug charge, and it changed him.

“That experience grounded me,” he tells Monk, who he thinks is Stagg R. Leigh. “The people I met in there allowed me to see a whole new world of underrepresented stories from underrepresented storytellers.”

Monk has to keep pretending to be Stagg, the writer-fugitive, to make a $4 million deal with Wiley. Monk is an obvious fake—he orders white wine in a restaurant—but he gets away with it because Wiley is so easy to fool. Californians will believe anything, which maybe is how my predecessor held onto this column for 11 years.

Course, it’s hard to know whether you find more truth in fiction or the real world. The old columnist here would probably quote Twain now, because he loves that 19th-century crap no one reads anymore: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.” But as a sportsman of the people, I give you Stephen King, who said that “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

King’s words go double-double for California. The line between fiction and truth here is even thinner than our movie stars.

Speaking of actors, you might say the Golden State’s biggest industry is producing fictions. Silicon Valley makes the tech to export the fictions Hollywood creates.

A more cynical way to put all this is that California is full of, well, “s—t.” Which means Californians, living in this fiction factory, confront more flavors of BS than Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins ever managed at their Glendale ice cream parlor.

When you’re enveloped in fictions, it can be hard to see the truth. You’re left with a choice among fictions—the same choice that Wiley and Monk face in American Fiction, when they debate how to end their movie within a movie. Should they just fade to black, and let the audience decide? Or should they provide a romantic, crowd-pleasing pose?

Eventually, they land on an ending that both surprises and perfectly expresses why we should be forgiving, of authors and ourselves, when fiction is used to fool us. Because these days it’s just too hard to distinguish between the real writer, and the fake the real writer dreams up.

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Everyone who’s the least bit plugged into the NFL or popular culture, or has spent at least five minutes out of a coma the past few months, knows why the Kansas City broadcast keeps cutting to the Chiefs’ luxury suite. Shots of Taylor Swift cheering for Travis Kelce are now seamlessly part of television coverage. Is it love? Is it a publicity stunt? Why does the media follow their every move so breathlessly—and why is America following along?

Only time might answer the first two questions, but history can help with the third.

Long before there was a Taylor and Travis (or, for that matter, a Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio), actress Helen Dauvray and baseball player John Montgomery Ward were the ones dominating the headlines of their day. The Dauvray-Ward romance and the media coverage it received offer a glimpse into the future of the celebrity power couple, from a time when entertainers and professional athletes were still socially suspect in the minds of the Gilded Age elites who valued the perceived purity of amateur pursuits.

In the late 19th century, the concept of publicity was starting to evolve. Instead of earning fame and media coverage through political or charitable deeds (or misdeeds), Americans started becoming newsworthy just by being well-known, in part due to the development of the celebrity interview, which both responded to and stimulated public interest, thus establishing a self-reinforcing public relations loop.

Helen Dauvray, the headliner of her own theatrical troupe, was a fixture of this loop. So famous was she that a October 12, 1887 New York Times article previewing her impending marriage to Ward identified her as “the well known actress” whose “history is too familiar for detail.” The journalist didn’t bother reprising Dauvray’s rise to fame as 1860s child performer “Little Nell,” and glossed over the actress’ time on the stage as Helen Gibson before she reinvented herself in Paris and changed her name because readers already knew the story; Dauvray had received 66 mentions in 1887 in the Times alone, not counting classified ads.

Her beau, John M. Ward, could not compete with Dauvray’s megawatt stardom. “[T]he man she is to marry is not so well known, although he has made a reputation on the diamond,” that same Times profile noted, providing readers with a thumbnail sketch of Ward’s baseball career so they could catch up: He’d won one championship, received bachelor’s and law degrees from Columbia, and had a role in founding the Brotherhood, the first labor union for major league baseball players. Not mentioned were the facts that Ward had pitched the second perfect game in professional baseball history, moved from pitcher to outfielder and shortstop, and served as player-manager of both the Providence Grays and New York Giants—all after allegedly being kicked out of Penn State for stealing a chicken.

If Times readers required a 101 course in Ward, no such introduction was necessary for enthusiasts (“fans” was just coming into usage) who subscribed to the Sporting Life or the Sporting News, the recently founded weeklies that were the ESPNs of the 1880s.  The front-page story in the October 19 issue of the Sporting Life called the Dauvray-Ward marriage “the sensation of the week” in “base ball,” which still appeared in print as two words.

The first breadcrumb of a Dauvray-Ward relationship appeared in late May 1887, when newspapers announced the actress’s gift of her self-named trophy, the Dauvray Cup, to be presented to the winner of a postseason championship series. On July 20th, her name was linked to Ward obliquely when Sporting Life identified her as a “perfect crank”—19th-century slang to describe an obsessive, unreasonable person—for his team, the New York Giants. Only in September did the first direct connection to Ward surface, when Dauvray mentioned him in a letter to the National League president that Sporting Life quoted from. Dauvray and Ward were not linked romantically until their Times marriage preview on October 12, just one day before they publicly tied the knot.

After the bombshell news dropped, papers were full of speculation about the couple, who were perhaps trying to avoid this very type of rumor-filled attention by keeping their relationship secret up until that point. As MLB historian John Thorn has established, the two had, in fact, first gotten married a month and a half before the Times reporter’s visit, on August 31, 1887. Was Dauvray playing games with the press when she didn’t admit to this on October 11? Doing so might have saved the couple a trip to Philadelphia the next morning to get married a second time.

The mystery around their coupling deepens when you consider an October 17 Detroit Tribune report that Thorn surfaced, which observed that the “newlyweds” appeared to be anything but happy: “[Ward and Dauvray] haven’t been married a week, but they didn’t seem particularly affectionate,” the Tribune correspondent wrote. “Ward shouted for the Detroits and Mrs. Ward applauded for the Browns … They occupied opposite ends of the box, and hardly spoke to each other during the contest.”

Reading between the lines more than 100 years later, such coverage raises the question of whether they were leveraging their relationship for attention, or if they were genuinely attempting to avoid feeding the rumor mill of 19th-century journalism. If they were seeking publicity, it’s worth asking for what end. Of the two, Dauvray would have benefitted the most from an image boost at that moment; the news of their relationship may have helped her recapture headlines after she canceled her fall season in early September following reports of a serious illness. Ward’s exploits on the field (he led the league with 111 steals that year) and the contract negotiations between the Brotherhood and the National League already kept him at the forefront of the sporting press.

After the hoopla surrounding the marriage subsided, the couple assumed a lower profile. Initially, they may have tried to stay out of the news after Dauvray’s brother was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a servant (the charges were later dropped). But minimal details were also given about their westward honeymoon travels in November, except that Dauvray intended to appear on stage during a charity event in San Francisco. This last detail seems to indicate that Dauvray, despite having announced her retirement from the stage following their marriage, was not ready to leave the limelight. Such speculation is supported by the pattern that developed over the next two years in the press: Dauvray’s name perennially appeared in the theater gossip column of the New York Times, where her return to the stage would be promised, only for those plans to be scuttled by some difficulty or illness.

Ward’s name, meanwhile, was in front of the sporting public regularly due to the mounting labor struggle between the Brotherhood Union and the National League. When that struggle came to a head in 1890, Dauvray and Ward received increased media attention again. As the leader of the Brotherhood, Ward was the face of the union’s labor war with the National League. In the reports of Ella Black, a Pittsburgh correspondent for the Sporting Life, Dauvray was credited as being perhaps both the inspiration for and the cause of the new major league formed by Ward.

That same year, in 1890, the Cosmopolitan published perhaps the most telling piece of media around the Dauvray-Ward romance: a satirical short story that was part roman à clef melodrama and part Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Ward was recognizable as Algernon de Witt Caramel, the “Champion Short-Stop of America.” Dauvray appears as Miss Violet Veronica Van Sittart, “our hero’s peerlessly beautiful fiancée.” The story ended with the young couple, living off the millions Caramel made as a shortstop, “doing very nicely indeed.”

Given that John Ward’s salary was $3,000 in 1887, the idea that a baseball player would ever earn millions of dollars for playing a child’s game hints at the key to the story’s satire. Because magazines like the Cosmopolitan were written for an upper-class audience, the editor likely chose the story not because it painted the couple in a positive light, but rather because it encouraged an elite audience to laugh at the efforts of professional actresses and ballplayers to rise above their stations.

In real life, Dauvray and Ward’s union was short-lived; 1890 was also the year that newspapers quietly announced the couple’s separation. Though it was not public knowledge at the time, Ward had also been seeing actress Jessie McDermott, according to Ward’s biographer, Brian Di Salvatore. Equally small notices chronicled their divorce three years later.

From its supernova start, the dissolution of Dauvray and Ward’s marriage is most notable for its understated silence. Nonetheless, for a brief, shining moment in the late 1800s, enthusiasts of the lime-lit dramatic boards and dusty ball diamonds could thrill at this uniquely American aristocratic union that served as a trial run for Marilyn and Joltin‘ Joe 60 years later, and now again with Taylor and Travis in this century—when the millions in question have become a matter of billions.

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While President John F. Kennedy was talking by phone with his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, on the morning of Tuesday, June 12, 1963, he suddenly exclaimed: “Jesus Christ!”

The president’s outburst had nothing to do with their conversation. Rather, he was responding to a photograph taken the day before, splashed on the front pages of the newspapers just delivered to him. The photo showed 73-year-old Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc engulfed in flames on a street in Saigon, South Vietnam while sitting calmly—it seemed—in the lotus posture. He hoped his drastic action might bring the world’s attention to what the Buddhists saw as the persecution against their religion by the Catholic regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Buddhist organizations had called for freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to assemble in public, and an end to the supposed Catholic bias in appointing government officials.

Captured by Malcom W. Browne, the head of the Associated Press’s bureau in Saigon, the photo retains its ability to stop conversations to this day, making it an enduring symbol of the power of protest. Meanwhile, critics insist that the photo, and the reporting from Vietnam by Western newsmen including Browne, David Halberstam of the New York Times, and Neil Sheehan of United Press International, were responsible for Diem’s downfall and America’s ultimate defeat and humiliation in Vietnam.

But Browne had been determined, he insisted, only to provide his readers with a “continuous, honest assessment of the situation” in what he called “a puzzling war.” He believed that officials in Vietnam—Americans and South Vietnamese—should have tried to do the same. Browne thought that living in a free society meant a journalist had to “tell all of the people all of the truth all of the time. The newsman is obliged to fight forces that interfere with this vital process.”

Criticism continued to follow Browne. Later, when he reported on the war in the Persian Gulf in 1991, detractors back home accused him of harming the American cause in its fight against Iraq. “This is just silly, of course,” Browne said. “To the extent that America newsmen ‘took sides’ in either Viet Nam or the Persian Gulf, it was on the side of the United States.” For all societies at war, the important truth, he suggested, was the truth “that tells you ‘we are the good guys and we are winning,’ regardless of what team you’re on,” reflected Browne.

Yet as American involvement in Vietnam wound down, it no longer seemed possible “to believe in the goodness and rightness of our cause,” Browne noted. The public had been regularly promised by its government that there was “a light at the end of the tunnel”—yet victory never came. Instead of pointing fingers at the individuals who involved the country in the conflict, many in the United States decided to “blame the messengers—people like myself who had been sending back discouraging tidings of how bad things had been going,” Browne said.

The story of the monk’s self-immolation began on May 8, 1963, when South Vietnamese army and security forces had killed civilians protesting a new governmental decree outlawing the flying of the Buddhist flag on Buddha’s birthday in Hue. These killings sparked protests against the Diem government’s perceived anti-Buddhist policies.

Quang Duc’s fiery sacrifice was the latest of these protests. Thirty-two-year-old Browne captured it on a cheap, Japanese Petri-brand camera. Browne had arrived in Saigon on November 7, 1961. He had witnessed the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam grow from about 3,000 American military advisers when he arrived to more than 16,000 by the end of 1963. Tipped off about the demonstration the evening before, he was the only Western reporter on the scene to capture the horrific event on film.

The elder monk uttered no sound as the flames consumed his body, and did not change his position. But from his spot about 20 feet to the right and a little in front of Quang Duc, Browne could see that his “features were contorted with agony” and could hear moans from the crowd that had gathered to watch, as well as the ragged chanting from the approximately 300 yellow-robed monks and gray-robed Buddhist nuns who had joined the protest.

The newsman found himself “numb with shock” at the horrible scene. Though witnessing anyone commit suicide or suffer a violent death “is always a hard experience,” Browne later noted, “you can get used to it in war, but there was something special about this. It was kind of a horror.”

After about ten minutes, the flames died down and the monk “pitched over, twitched convulsively and was still.” Seemingly out of nowhere, a coffin appeared and fellow monks attempted to place Quang Duc inside. It was no use. The monk’s limbs, Browne recalled, “had been roasted to rigidity, and he could not be bent enough to fit in the casket. As the procession moved off toward Xa Loi Pagoda, his blackened arms protruded from the coffin, one of them still smoking.”

Browne’s film soon made its way from the AP bureau in Saigon to Manila with the aid of a “pigeon”—a regular passenger on a commercial flight willing to act as a courier to avoid censorship by South Vietnamese government officials. The photos were sent via the AP WirePhoto cable from Manila to San Francisco, and from there to the news agency’s headquarters in New York. There, the images were distributed to AP member newspapers around the world.

The reaction was immediate. While millions of words had been written about the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam, Browne’s pictures possessed what the correspondent later termed “an incomparable impact.”

A group of clergymen in the United States used the photograph for full-page advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post decrying American military aid to a country that denied most of its citizens religious freedoms. Vietnamese Buddhist leaders emblazoned the image on placards they carried during demonstrations. Officials in communist China used the image for propaganda purposes, distributing copies throughout Southeast Asia and attributing the monk’s death to the work of “the U.S. imperialist aggressors and their Diemist lackeys.”

When President Kennedy called Henry Cabot Lodge to the White House to discuss his ambassadorship to South Vietnam, the president had on his desk a copy of the monk photograph. “I suppose that no news picture in recent history had generated as much emotion around the world as that one had,” Lodge noted.

Browne’s photograph has become one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War, seared into the collective American conscience alongside two other AP photographs—Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution,” his graphic shot of a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla being summarily executed at point-blank range by a South Vietnamese police chief, and Nick Ut’s “Terror of War,” showing a naked, nine-year-old girl screaming as she runs down a road with her skin burned from a South Vietnamese napalm bombing that mistakenly hit her village.

Browne, who won a Pulitzer in 1964 for his reporting from Vietnam, was often asked if he could have done anything to prevent Quang Duc from taking his life. But Browne realized that it would have been fruitless to try to intervene. The monks and nuns gathered for the protest stood ready to block anyone who dared to interfere. When a fire truck appeared, some of the monks had leapt in front of their wheels to stop them.

Quang Duc’s sacrifice weighed on Browne, who died on August 27, 2012. “I don’t think many journalists take pleasure from human suffering,” he noted, but he did have to admit to “having sometimes profited from others’ pain.” Although by no means intentional on his part, that fact did not help, Browne noted. “Journalists inadvertently influence events they cover, and although the effects are sometimes for the good, they can also be tragic,” he said. “Either way, when death is the outcome, psychic scars remain.”

There were other deaths that Browne witnessed in Vietnam—losses that became mere “footnotes” in the history of the war compared to the “theater of the horrible” that Quang Duc’s sacrifice represented for his cause. Browne, however, never forgot them. He had learned during his career to deal with “the ugliest events of our times,” including keeping his wits as he observed the dead and wounded on a battlefield. Browne was able to do his job by “concentrating on the mechanics of news covering. I have the nightmares afterwards.”

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The study of epidemics has routinely centered around what medical historian Charles Rosenberg calls a “dramaturgic structure”: a story of infection that builds to a climax of widespread illness and woe, and then comes to a definitive end. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has defied this structure, failing to come to a complete stop. But this is not the first time in history that the social and cultural impacts of an epidemic have continued past the time that the state and much of society declare that it is over. Epidemics often live far beyond their supposed ends. My research into 19th-century cholera epidemics in Argentina’s northwestern province of Tucumán shows that epidemics don’t have a single, definitive end, but instead two incomplete ones: the celebrated end when an authority declares the outbreak over, and the muted end brought about by gradual loss of interest.

Three cholera epidemics befell Tucumán in the 19th century, in 1867-68, in 1886-87, and in 1894-95. Each time, the bacterium vibrio cholerae, which causes the disease, arrived in the province through trade and migration. During the 19th century, new railroad lines connected the populous coast with the nation’s interior, radically transforming Tucumán, a place where social, economic, and political life was dictated by sugarcane cultivation and refining. The new train lines allowed the sugar industry to import improved machinery and to attract workers for the yearly harvest. They also brought new diseases to the province, where endemic malaria and occasional bouts of measles and smallpox had already taken hold. Cholera was one of these new illnesses. The gastrointestinal disease benefited from the lack of plumbing in the 19th century that moved human waste in a sanitary and efficient manner. As a result, urban and confined spaces were prime areas for outbreaks.

In Argentina, cholera first landed at the bustling ports of Buenos Aires aboard many of the ships that arrived daily to transport people and goods. Global trade routes facilitated cholera’s transit from the waters of the Indian Ocean, its point of origin, to Argentina. Once there, it moved over the country’s new rail lines to the interior provinces.

Cholera spread through trade and migration routes. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection.

The first two cholera epidemics paralyzed Tucumán’s economy and society—especially the sugar industry that dominated all areas of the social fabric, and that provided elites with the foundation for their political and economic power. As news reached Tucumán of a possible outbreak, officials mustered resources to prepare. They transformed two rail stations into sanitary stations to inspect and fumigate goods and travelers arriving in the province. Doctors prepared labs to inspect bodily fluids for vibrio cholerae, to confirm disease and enforce isolation practices. Cholera particularly impacted the popular classes, who lived in makeshift homes built from found materials, with multiple families sharing the space. Many businesses closed, either from their own decision or because workers were staying home out of fears of contracting the disease. The affluent retreated to their private homes in the mountains, both as a form of social distancing and under the belief that higher altitude was salubrious.

The epidemics also created national political turmoil. In 1887, a mob in the southern countryside rose up against and killed volunteer Spanish Red Cross workers from Buenos Aires, believing free medications were laced with poison. From there, the mob moved throughout the countryside in search of other Red Cross workers. The event became national news, with sectors of the press considering the attack an act of xenophobia. The national government used the attack—and the supposed general mishandling of the epidemic in Tucumán—as a pretext to remove the local government.

On November 6, 1894, as summer approached in Argentina, the Tucumán newspaper El Orden reported that the province was “entering the season of the year in which the warm temperature is ideal for epidemics.” The editors urged the local government to enforce preventative measures, calling for street cleaning, for draining the pools of stagnant water that collected during the rainy summer, and for the province’s small cadre of health officials to monitor the living conditions of the popular classes.

The paper reported on the situation throughout the summer. Suspected cases of cholera appeared by the end of November, but through February of 1895 there was nothing concrete. Then, in March, cases erupted. El Orden reported, for instance, that one man abandoned his sick wife, María Gutiérrez, in front of the sole hospital in the provincial capital, San Miguel. Gutiérrez is one of the few cholera victims recorded by name; in other instances, the newspaper simply wrote about illnesses of “a man on the 1000 block of San Juan Avenue” or “20 cases in the town of San Felipe.”

Despite the newspaper’s careful record of the epidemic, however, official government documents reported no cholera epidemic in Tucumán in 1894-95. The province’s governor gave an annual address declaring early preventative measures a resounding success. He applauded the provincial Hygiene Commission for coming in under budget on a program to disinfect all people, goods, and things entering Tucumán along railway lines, and even went so far as to suggest that public health conditions in Tucumán had improved.

Authorities and local journalists had completely different interpretations of the epidemic. Perhaps fearing a repeat of 1887, the government rushed to declare the 1894 outbreak over before it had even begun.

In my research, I used El Orden, one of the only sources documenting the 1894-95 epidemic, to track how the muted end of the epidemic—the flipside of the provincial government’s declaration that the outbreak had never even begun—unfolded. I searched the papers for articles reporting deaths. While the newspaper at first vigilantly documented the epidemic, with cholera dominating its front pages, after a few weeks, its reporting on new cases and deaths became less frequent. Eventually, new cases and deaths were relegated to the back pages, alongside business advertisements and classifieds.

The last cases reported by the newspaper noted 10 peons dying at the mill of industrialist-politician Wenceslao Posse, three at the General Hospital of San Miguel, and many more cases in the immediate countryside of San Miguel. From there, discussions of the epidemic evolved into more general concerns about the continued growth of the province’s population and worries over a proliferation of shantytowns, few paved streets, limited potable water access, and having one of the nation’s highest infant mortality rates. The public slowly lost interest in cholera, even as deaths continued, evidenced by sporadic mentions buried in the pages of El Orden.

The epidemic’s slow fade-out came from simple fatigue: Actors across the social spectrum were tired of working to prevent the disease, and balked when preventative measures created economic costs. Put another way, for both the celebrated and muted ends, the epidemic ended when the market and public health could not work in sync. The points of reckoning just came at different times for different sectors of society.

Much of the same is seen in the current pandemic, whose endpoint has been anything but clear. As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and municipalities relax guidelines regarding quarantine and masking, arguing that COVID has reached a state of endemicity, others reject the idea of ending public health interventions and resigning ourselves to a future of regular outbreaks. Still others argue that the end of the epidemic does not come from lifting restrictions, but from reinforcing measures that protect the vulnerable sections of society, like the immunocompromised, those with vulnerable conditions, and the elderly.

The process of calling an end to the current pandemic is difficult and uncertain. One lesson from Tucumán is that it is likely not up to us to declare the end of COVID, but to future generations who will look back and see through the contradictions we leave in our historical material.

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