‘The Most Important Journalist You’ve Never Heard Of’

William Worthy, a dissident American journalist who defied the U.S. government by reporting from the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Iran, North Vietnam and Algeria during the Cold War, died this month at age 92 of Alzheimer’s disease. Award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill and others remark on his life.

“Democracy Now!” spent an hour remembering Worthy in its Monday broadcast:

In the late 1950s, the State Department refused to renew his passport after he returned from a reporting trip into China. Despite not having a passport, Worthy traveled to Cuba in 1961 — two years after the Cuban Revolution — and interviewed Fidel Castro. He was arrested upon returning to the United States — not for traveling to Cuba but for entering the United States illegally — an American citizen without a passport. The ordeal became the subject of Phil Ochs’ song, “The Ballad of William Worthy.” In 1981, Worthy traveled to Iran, two years after the revolution ousted the U.S.-backed Shah, resulting in a series of blockbuster exposés about U.S. actions in Iran.

On the program, Jeremy Scahill, who considered Worthy a mentor, said: “For this generation of younger journalists who are coming of age in the era of the Edward Snowden documents, WikiLeaks, of the government surveillance on the metadata of journalists and many millions of people in this country and around the world, I would say that William Worthy is the single most important journalist that they’ve never heard of.”

He continued: “If Bill Worthy was a white journalist, and not been an African-American journalist, he would be much better known than he is right now.”

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.