THE PROBLEM WITH REPORTING

The Real New York Times Scandal (James Versluys, Vol.2 Issue 36, The Texas Mercury)

A long time ago, a friend and I were reading a description of the area we lived in at the time and marveled at the inaccuracy of it. Marveled probably isn't the right word, hooted and laughed was more like it. I don't remember what the article was about, but I remember the intended descriptor and our reactions with crystal clarity, and I had what, for a young fellow in his later teen years, amounts to a profound insight into the nature of journalism. I'm not only proud that I attained the thought at such a young age, I've been saying it ever since: if you want to fully grasp the tenuous nature of human understanding, read an out-of-town journalist's take on your situation and its people, and you will never again trust the profession. The lies aren't in the reporter. They're in the system of reporting itself. It's a lazy and inaccurate business even when the individual isn't a lazy and inaccurate man.

I've had enough experience as a reporter to lead me to believe in pack behavior and packaged ideas even in the soi-disant independent press. I went to Huntsville to report on the execution of a black convicted criminal, one bad dude named Gary Graham. I found a bored group of people milling about, spitting on the lawn and telling fat girl jokes while the on-air media from well-paid television studios were making up a scene of breathtaking protest action. They were, to a man, fabricating the situation surrounding us. I have never been able to tell if this surprising lack of credible research was something they did as a matter of course in order to gain viewers or they really couldn't tell what was happening. But I do know they didn't even put forth a minimal amount of effort. When I heard the news that New York Times columnist Rick Bragg was caught showing up for only two hours in the locations he covered, the snarky part of my brain whispered "What, was he doing an in depth report?"

Here's why.

I distinctly remember one on-air news reporter from a far away state who was covering Gary Graham’s execution. He got out of a van, asked another one of the reporters assembled if anything was going on in a tone that suggested this was the most boring thing he'd ever done in his life. He then made up a story that sounded as if he had been there all day picking the brains of the people in the crowd, when in reality he'd just finished fixing his well sprayed hair and stretching his legs from the long drive. The total time this well coifed newsman spent gathering information on the people present, from the time he got out of the van to the time he started telling everyone about the nature of the protesting crowd in front of the Huntsville prison, was maybe sixty seconds. And it only took him that long because the cameraman was fumbling with something. I wasn't surprised by that time, though, because of my early exposure to the works of journalism. Rick Bragg may very well be a disgrace to his profession, but I can't keep it out of my mind that he stayed an hour and fifty-nine minutes longer than our friend the television reporter did.

Sullivan and his readers and the world at-large are learning the wrong lesson from the Jayson Blair imbroglio. The truth is a bit more scandalous, and in a way a bit more pedestrian than they've been led to believe. The turgid reality is that the most important kind of reporting, the kind which goes beyond a merely technical recitation of facts, is a very hard and highly subjective business. Reporters from large and distinguished papers don't seem to be any more able to look through the veil of image and reality than reporters and writers from small or independent media. They may also find it harder to peer through the haze of human understanding: after all, reporters like David Barstow are people with good jobs, good salaries and friends who are in the business. It's very easy to fall into the habit of checking your facts against what other people in the business already think. Even in places where there is a simple comradeship, the instinct will always be to repeat what everyone in the newsroom knows as opposed to blazing new trails or seeing for yourself. In places with gladiator/leader editors like Howell Raines the regularly powerful human incentives to conformity are vastly multiplied, to the point where there is always pressure to think and say the right thing at the right time.

What this means in practice is that you arrive at a place expecting to see what you already know. The journalists and reporters and "on-air personalities" at the Graham execution already knew the protestors were worked up and indignant, and it fit the program bill, so what if they didn't seem all that agitated when they got out of the van? Heck, they would be in a tizzy any second, wouldn't they? No sense in waiting around for a spark of life to report the inevitable, reasons the reporter. After all, he's been made to drive all the way to some godawful place in Texas to report, and he's just human, and everyone knows the protestors are indignant and hyped, so...

And pretty soon it seems senseless waiting around to see anything, you might as well just report it anyway. Blair just went one step further and took what he already knew into the realm of whole fabric fiction instead of going through the motions of reporting at the scene like the Huntsville news crew. The most important lesson—and the most damning indictment—to learn about the Blair scandal at the New York Times is how short the leap was into making up contacts. The most astute observations on the nature of the protest I went to came offhand from an old lady wobbling back to her apartment: "These people are bored and looking for something to do on the weekend." In little more than a dozen words she explained more about the true nature of the gathered pack than all the journalists and news anchors gathered. Something is certainly wrong with journalism when a truth obvious to bystanders is hidden from our best and brightest.

You sure see a lot of weird stuff at the Texas Mercury but gems like this article by Versluys and pretty much everything written by Derek Copold (the one person on the web who always writes something worth reading) show why it remains one of the better sites around. Posted by M Ali Choudhury at June 10, 2003 7:39 AM