BAYEUX, France — The Prix Bayeux jury was somewhere between Afghanistan and Gaza, deliberating over war coverage as we do each year, when my phone buzzed news as crucial to the world’s fate as those noisier battles on Normandy beaches up the road a lifetime ago.

With tepid understatement, the Nobel Peace Prize committee cited “increasingly adverse conditions” for newsgathering, as it singled out Maria Ressa, the fearless Filipina who runs Rappler, and Dmitry Muratov, the Russian editor who has buried seven reporters since 2000.

A growing penchant to silence journalists has finally made headlines. In separate responses, both laureates made the same point: If trusted, truthful reporters cannot hold autocrats to account, we are all toast. And we are fast running out of time to react.

Those endless rows of graves near here, dug during my lifespan, make clear what havoc a self-obsessed megalomaniac can wreak. That war killed millions. If we get climate collapse, peaceful coexistence and runaway pandemics wrong, the likely toll defies imagination.

Over a photo of his newsroom, Muratov wrote: “The whole Novaya Gazeta and everyone who worked and works there. Alive and dead. This is their prize.” He started the paper in 1993, helped by Mikhail Gorbachev. His bloodhounds still pursue the culprit who ordered the 2006 poisoning of Anna Polikovskaya, whose Chechnya reporting infuriated Vladimir Putin.

Maria Ressa’s online Rappler has dogged Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines since he took power, fending off 10 arrest orders, brutal harassment and countless death threats. Among independent journalists worldwide, she is Joan of Arc without the political-religious baggage.

They are two among many determined to get the story straight at any cost to keep the rest of us from being blind, deaf — and dumb — as our world spins out of control.

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PARIS — Last week I watched 16 hours of back-to-back Senate and House hearings on Afghanistan in stunned disbelief as Republicans displayed stone stupidity, treacherous truth-twisting, or both at the same time. Most harangued, few questioned. Then there was worse.

Some insightful reporters captured the essence. Mostly, Washington watchdogs snuffled around the surface, hounding the wrong quarry. Overall coverage blamed a doddering old Joe for a shameful debacle of historic proportions because he rejected military advice.

The Afghanistan story reverberates around the world all the louder because so many Americans overlook its implications.

Unless a failsafe “fourth estate” gets stories straight and focuses harsh light on politicians with the morality of rabid jackals, Republicans may soon control Congress and more statehouses. A madman could be back in the White House, unbound by checks or balances.

U.S. forces pulled off a masterful evacuation despite circumstances created by Donald Trump’s abject capitulation. Until Gen. Mark Milley convinced him to delay, he planned to withdraw all troops by Jan. 15, with no evacuation plan and few visas for vulnerable Afghans.

Republicans savaged Biden because a suicide bomber killed 11 Marines, a soldier and sailor. Few of them had lamented losses over the years as U.S. defense contractors amassed fortunes, and American casualties rose steadily to far surpass Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 toll.

Whether or not Americans grasp the enormity of the real debacle, terrorist groups do. This was no carefully planned blitzkrieg behind overwhelming armor and artillery. Ragtag zealots on motorcycles overran the proxy army of a space-age superpower, hardly firing a shot.

Republicans say Biden diminished the United States in its allies’ eyes. In fact, allies see them as the problem: venal politicians who parrot fabulist insanities of a defeated president intent on a creeping coup d’etat. In much of the world, America is scorned and pitied, if not hated.

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WILD OLIVES, France — Whether on battlefields or in backwoods Provence, reality bites up close. “Over the horizon,” America’s catchphrase du jour, smacks of the over-the-rainbow fantasia that little Dorothy imagined on a bad day in Kansas. Red shoes won’t save us.

Timeless groves here face new pests and pestilence, and so do the struggling families who live among them. Olives and people have fed one another around here since Romans built an empire meant to last. This is not breaking news, but it is heartbreaking.

During six decades of reporting, I’ve found the proverbial cup is always part full and part empty. What counts is whether it is being replenished or drained. Because boundless human ingenuity is so seldom matched with human empathy, we are fast nearing the dregs.

In truth, today is glorious. I feel like that New Yorker cartoon guy who ignores a flower-flecked hillside meadow and mutters that the world is crap. Yet CNN drones on in the background, and the Afghan rug by my desk is a map of warring provinces with a tank motif.

Climate collapse and runaway pandemics demand a cohesive global response. Yet reaction to the Afghanistan debacle suggests that America is too wrapped up in itself and misguided by partisan truth-twisting to be of much help. What we don’t know is killing us.

Firsthand facts and ground truth matter less these days when journalists can cover news the way modern armies prefer to fight wars — from a safe distance over the horizon. With new technology, they can get things wrong at the speed of light.

The new tools help. From a distance, smart reporters sensed something suspicious about the Aug. 29 drone strike that killed an aid worker and nine others, including young kids playing around his car. Without leaving their desks, they revealed an accidental tragedy. But still.

A young New York Times tech-equipped sleuth asserts that new methods allow her team to expose travesties that would otherwise go unnoticed. Not really. Reporters on the spot cover “collateral damage” and add in crucial elements about its impact. If they are there.

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PARIS — European newscasts have focused for weeks on a violent nation cursed by a pandemic, where armed fundamentalists hostile to Western values want one-party rule, a cowed press and kangaroo courts. And besides America, they also talk about Afghanistan.

In fact, Joe Biden is building back — often better — despite a deadlocked Congress and a predecessor intent on sabotage. But “United States” is a misnomer. Adversaries muscle in where its leadership falters; allies hedge bets on the future as it tears itself further apart.

A world facing climatic endgame and authoritarian takeover needs an America with a functioning democracy, run by enlightened leaders who rise above narrow interests to work together. Instead, Republican zealots wage an Afghan-style war at home.

H.R. McMaster, who as national security adviser failed to housebreak Donald Trump, foresees “an endless jihad that enemies of all civilized people are waging against us all.” If Americans don’t unite against that, he told an interviewer, “we are all at enormous risk.”

He says Trump’s clueless hubris produced hands-down surrender. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020,” he said. “The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.” He expects tighter links to Al Qaeda and others, even ISIS-K, to export a twisted view of Islam helped by intelligence and sophisticated weaponry Americans left behind.

Generals can be dubious analysts, prone to seeing lights at the end of tunnels. But McMaster is a military scholar who saw in Vietnam how a swift turn of events sends panicked people scrambling toward the exits. After covering war since the 1960s, I think he’s right.

Yet when Americans badly need to close ranks, faithless politicians howl for impeachment. Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, with so much blood on their own hands, excoriate Biden. Others who want his job – with neither integrity nor sense of the real world – pile on.

A traditional Fourth Estate should be our safeguard. But it no longer works that way. Many in the “news media” tower of babble that Trump did so much to create choose to fault Biden for the inevitable finale of a needless war he has tried to end since 2009.

Biden’s failings will be clear when the war fog lifts. He infuriated NATO allies by not consulting before a sudden chaotic airlift. He says he had to act fast when President Ashraf Ghani fled in secret after pledging to negotiate a stable peace. The Taliban juggernaut caught most everyone by surprise.

Unsurprisingly, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal immediately editorialized that Biden was responsible for a debacle it called “one of the most shameful in history” and berated him for laying his guilt on Trump. And that was echoed widely in “news” reporting.

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FLAYOSC, France — Here we go again. Americans clamor for the exits, leaving behind innocent blood and sophisticated weapons for jubilant irregulars who humiliated them with antiquated guns and makeshift bombs.

I've seen this, over and over, from Vietnam in the 1970s to Iraq not long ago. Players differ, but not the plot. Societies react badly to uninvited foreign saviors. However noble your intentions, you can't deliver democracy at gunpoint.

Imperial déjà vu dates back millennia. A raging flood not long ago in this Provence backwater exposed paving stones on the route from Brittania to Rome, where all roads once led. Every empire eventually fades by military overreach or internal rot — or both.

By Roman ruins east of here in Frejús, a memorial cemetery recalls France's centuries-long mission civilisatrice. A mission to civilize. JFK brushed off Charles de Gaulle's warnings about trying to reshape an ancient culture. The United States, he said, had nobler intentions.

Most Americans, not imperialists, want to do the right thing and come home. But few know what the right thing is. Generals loath to admit defeat by a ragtag rabble see lights at the end of tunnels. One president passes stalemate on to the next. And people keep dying.

Reporters who get close enough to see and smell the story are shouted down by a different sort of journalist who speculates about what is happening from a safe distance. When reality bites, they can only grumble with an unhelpful refrain: We tried to tell you.

Afghanistan especially. News anchors stumble at such names as Lashkar Gah, the Helmand Province capital. Yet anyone who bothered to notice would have watched the endless Helmand meat grinder. Brits, then Americans, died to take square meters they later lost.

Despite risk and hardship, experienced pros were ready to go - and to train young tyros to join their ranks. But bosses balked at high expense and responsibility if employees ran into trouble. America mostly saw distant reality skewed through the looking glass.

I hurried to Pakistan after 9/11, trying to reach Kandahar when the story was simply a SWAT team job. The Taliban, busy at home, was not the enemy. U.S. forces only needed to capture Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda encourage, sheltered by Mullah Omar's Taliban faction.

Pentagon generals knew how Bin Laden operated. He was among warlords and volunteer foreign Islamists America armed to beat back Soviet troops. With Stinger missiles to blast helicopters, Afghans chased the mighty Red Army back across their northern border.

That should have been a clue. Russians rumbled to war by road. Americans were not likely to subdue Afghanistan from half a world away. Vietnam showed that bombs and scorched earth tactics, with “collateral damage,” only harden an adversary's resolve.

History from Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great to Britain's Lord Elfinstone was no comfort. Teaching students, I made this simple: Plunge a knife into a bucket of water. Hold it in one place, and you're in control. Move it, and it is as if you were never there.

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