Where the Truth Comes From: Journalistic Integrity

(Blog post model, 30-1 English personal response piece) 

One morning when I was in grade 11, I came down the stairs running late, and noticed that the news was on in the living room. I remember thinking that was weird. My family is not good at being on time. It just added to our already seemingly inevitable lateness to have any distractions before getting out of the house on a weekday, so my siblings and I were never allowed to watch TV before school. My parents didn’t usually either; we were living in what my family refers to as “the Bed and Breakfast house”, because it was in fact that: The Knight Inn. My Mom’s mornings were dealing with guests and making breakfast for everyone in the world who came to stay or live at our house. My Dad was generally getting ready for work in the mornings, and I’m sure my younger sister and brother ate breakfast, but I was too self-involved to notice most of the time unless they had gotten into the bathroom before I did. So I left the house thinking the TV being on was strange, but didn’t give it a second thought.

I only noticed because it was right near the front door. I saw the screen for a moment as I left for school, but didn’t give the video it had shown a second thought once I’d left the busy house. It was the usual quiet, early-morning, small-town street, an easy walk with no snow and only a little bite in the air. It was always a noticeable switch – the house was a happening place most of the time, and we are not a quiet family. There have been more people than I could list that have been around me in the morning, and I preferred to be late in the morning to avoid dealing with these randoms, excepting of course the hot ones (Matthew the helicopter pilot from Australia…big fan). I was also a lover of sleep like most teenagers, and so I would get up with exactly enough time to shower, do my hair, put on mascara, dress, and grab a Nutrigrain bar for my 17-minute walk through town to school. I to this day nearly gag at the thought of eating even one more of those things after my six years of this seventh-to-twelfth-grade routine.

When I got to school – late – I walked down an empty hallway to my locker then to a classroom where my classmates seemed to be, not our usual classroom. When I got there, there was the holy grail of learning activities before smart boards: a boxy old tube TV strapped to a wheeled cart. The TV was on, and the whole class was watching. The room was packed full. All the desks were taken, with people sitting on the tops of them too, and on the countertops on the side of the room. I came in and stood at the back with a few others. I started watching with the others, but couldn’t really see it, or was distracted maybe by people talking, I can’t remember. I do know I didn’t really get what was happening until my teacher turned down the volume and started talking about what we were apparently seeing. It was September 11^th, 2001, and we were watching one of the twin towers with a plane stuck into it.

I don’t trust my memory now to remember what I actually watched as live-footage television, but we re-watched for a year, and then occasionally until they got Bin Laden and we saw Hillary’s reaction to his death on the news. They can’t really use live footage of an American-sanctioned execution I guess; it seems like that kind of broadcasting would be unethical and inflammatory, to say nothing of dehumanizing for the population requesting it. We still seem to see those towers fall on anniversaries. I have students who have never been alive in a world that hasn’t had this happened.

I don’t pretend to know how people felt as they watched or lived or experienced this. I only know that I felt sad, but not as sad as I thought I should feel. I couldn’t really understand that kind of damage, that kind of number. It’s like hearing about six million Jews being murdered in the Holocaust, eight hundred thousand Rwandans killed in the genocide, or two million Cambodians wiped out in the Killing Fields by their own Khmer Rouge. It’s just so many people to imagine; it sounds like a number, and not at all like the sound of many individual lives and universes being massacred. I think I must have a brain defence mechanism or kill switch for that kind of volume. If I could feel for every one of those people the way it might feel to lose one person in those circumstances, I think it would suffocate me. I wouldn’t survive that kind of emotionally devastating onslaught, losing one person alone I care deeply for can be enough to do it, to feel that with scale would be unmanageable.

So I stood in the back of the classroom and watched the news, and tried to feel something more than I did about what the journalists were talking about and showing. I don’t think I tapped into empathy for these masses until I heard some of the stories of people left behind. I watched the buildings, the real-life silver screen-like destruction, but I didn’t, I couldn’t, understand or grasp the magnitude of what this kind of death is; not until I heard someone’s 911 phone call recorded, or someone’s last words shared with their loved ones, that I could put myself in those shoes enough to feel a fraction of that kind of pain. It sounds terrible to me that I would need to hear a first-hand account of suffering in order to understand a fraction of what that must be, but it is different for me to hear the story than it is to watch a building collapse on a screen. Once I’ve heard someone’s story, I can think about what that would be like for me – if my parent went to work and didn’t come home; if my family were horrifically ripped apart; if I had to hear those last few words, somehow lucky to have one last chance but uncomprehendingly devastated knowing it would be. I can’t understand or feel with others the same way if there is silence where there should be stories.

As a reader, lover of words and language, and student of communication, I will always see the value of stories. At the same time, I see the dangers of only hearing that kind of information or experiencing from individual’s perspectives. Making decisions based on information that is emotional will have consequences, especially if it is not well-balanced with information that is logical and credible. I wasn’t interested in news growing up, but I now truly appreciate what I thought of as “boring” news reporting before.

Human interest “stories” sometimes seem to overrun the airwaves, with reality TV, celebrity news, and people hiring agents to manage the media maelstrom of their tragedies. I now recognize the danger of stories, and the value of silence, or at least restraint. Emotionality is attached to human stories, and our brains do seem to grasp the smaller examples better than the larger statistics. The danger of emotionality is that it makes for some terrible logic. Rational information leads to rational decision making. Hearing about the damage one person has done to another can make others afraid that the same thing could happen to them; it makes a person feel a little bit of what that could be like, and makes it easy to jump the gun and respond reactively. It’s so easy to pass judgment from afar, and so much less of an investment.

As someone who has had a life filled with people telling me their stories, I know that there are at least three sides to every story, as my Mom would say, “one side, the other side, and the truth”. There is a time and a place to ask others to bravely “tell [their] truth” (Smith), and it is important to hold space for the experiences that are our histories. But we must ask journalists to be rational, to know how stories need to be told, even if that means sacrificing the stories of the few in favour of informing the masses as stories unfold. The reductivist approach is incomplete, but perhaps protective as well. That integrity is not always sexy, but it is the best outfit to see worn in the service of public safety.

Reference – See “The Danger of Silence” TED Talk by Clint Smith

**This post was created in response to a topic my 30-1 students are also writing about. Topic and my request for feedback are posted below. 

What do these texts suggest to you about the way journalistic integrity creates public safety?

-Any text we have examined so far is fair game (Spotlight not yet recommended – unfinished!)

-Recommended to reference: latest Simon Sinek reading, “ At Any Expense”

-Required in reference: Clint Smith, “The Danger of Silence” TED talk

Feedback Requests (to the 30-1 class): 

I’d love your thoughts about my ideas and connections generally. Is there anything you’d like to know more about that I’ve mentioned? I’m worried that it is too long/ overly wordy, and that my progression is muddied by description. I also may have something of a didactic tone by then end, I’d like to avoid this and leave enough room for readers to also reach their own conclusions (not just prescribe the ones I’ve come to myself for them). If you notice my paragraph breaks are not working well in moving the story forward, or if I have some odd punctuation (ex. Quiet early morning small town street, quiet, early-morning, small-town street, quiet early morning, small-town street…) that is confusing rather than adding complexity, please identify and make suggestions. There isn’t anything I can think of that would be hurtful to hear back about this particular blog post. Thanks for your time and consideration!