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Memo to the class:
On my last morning in Asia, I rode the bus from an apartment in Sandy
Bay to the University of Hong Kong, where I had a desk in the Journalism
and Media Studies Centre. Because of the terrorism, I had been unable
to get home. After days of trying, I flew from Shanghai to Hong Kong,
where there would be more flights to Americas once the logjam broke.
The bus went by the big Chinese Christian cemetery that slopes steeply
down from Pokfulam Road to the water. The cemetery is so big and so packed
with graves that it’s almost impossible to find your way in it without
precise instructions. I think of it as the labyrinth of the dead, and
somewhere in it my father lies.
When I visited my father’s grave a few years ago, one of my brothers
laid a newspaper by his place instead of flowers. My father was an editor.
He was a much different editor and a much different man than I have been.
My father was decisive, fast and accurate off the mark and charismatic.
He was dangerously charming and had many wives. I have brothers and sisters
I’ll never meet. At his funeral, grieving women appeared, leading
their children up to the coffin to pay tearful last respects. No one knew
who the women were.
But despite the different lives we lived and the different human beings
we became, we were both journalists, animated by the same adrenaline rushes
that come with fast-breaking news. We were both editors of large papers.
And yet, at the core we represented contrasting perspectives on journalism
and life. My father saw them as quite separate, and everything in life
had to yield to the imperative of the story. I see life and journalism
as one, indivisible.
The terrible events of recent weeks have made me more convinced of it,
and I suspect many journalists who have had to do their jobs under unimaginable
circumstances might agree. For them, both their humanity and their journalism
have been placed in the crucible.
Let me tell you a story that may explain why I believe as I do. On the
night I was born, half of what was then called Great Western Road in Shanghai
was in flames. My father was the editor of the China Press. My mother
was in labor.
My father dropped her off on the curb, outside the Shanghai Women's Hospital,
and sped off to direct the coverage of the fire. She made her way inside
alone.
In a few years, the war came. Shanghai was occupied by enemy troops, life
became more difficult, and then after a few more years it was over. By
then, my parents' marriage was also over and my mother got us passage
back to the United States. Everyone was at the pier to see us off -- grandparents,
uncles and aunts, servants and friends. Everyone but my father.
When I asked where he was, someone said, at the office. He was very busy.
That’s the way it was in the newspaper business, they said.
For much of my life, I took pride in that. Journalism was the most important
thing there was. My father’s wife was giving birth, his son was going
away, perhaps forever -- but the newspaper business was so important that
he would have to set aside the normal responsibilities of living. I wanted
to be like that, to be part of something so significant and so grand.
In time, I came to see things differently, but for a long time the question
of journalism and humanity seemed not worth discussing. We followed a
path that led to a Holy Grail. We worshipped at the shrine of the Big
Story. What many journalists declared as the public's right to know gave
us license to take leave of all other human considerations and if we doctored
certain facts to make a better story, if people were harmed in the process,
we talked of "the larger truth."
I do not know exactly when they began to change but much of it had to
do with the fact that I became a father. Late as it was, I was rejoining
the human race. Those questions that unthinkingly were answered on the
side of journalism now stood revealed as not only ludicrous but monstrous:
Cover a fire or attend the birth of your child? Be so busy putting out
the next day's paper that you cannot say goodbye to your son as he goes
across the ocean?
Most of the conflicts we face as reporters and editors are not so obvious
as these. The great British novelist E.M. Forster once wrote that if forced
between betraying his country or betraying a friend, he hoped he would
have the courage to betray England.
Rarely are we asked to choose between betraying journalism or our humanity
-- but if the decision ever comes I know where I would like to stand,
between the "news" and my family or my friends -- or you. But
as I said, the decisions usually are not so clear. The conflict most often
takes place in territory shrouded in grayness.
I should declare, however, that my bias lies with publication, with doing
journalism. The arguments for shedding light, for lifting facts out of
darkness and sifting them, often result in arguments on behalf of silence,
of keeping the shades down, of not stirring the pot. They will appeal
to your better nature, to your sense of guilt, to anything that will keep
truth under a shroud.
The terribly hard part for us is to judge, to weigh, to decide. For every
100 persons who cry wolf, predicting the direst outcome if you proceed
with journalism, there is one whose plea for consideration is compelling.
You need a system that both keeps you going though a deafening chorus
demanding that you stop and helps you brake when that lonely, deserving
voice is heard.
The hard work of reconciling journalism and humanity are too much for
some reporters and editors. There are those who take refuge behind the
ethic of the craft, asserting that the public's right to know transcends
everything and to hell with the rest. Every case is resolved by that argument,
no matter how small or irrelevant the facts may be.
There are those journalists, too, for whom almost any conflict is too
painful -- those who cannot stand the possibility of hurting anyone, regardless
of ultimate benefit. Understandably, they often conclude that journalism
is not for them.
The committed journalist who stays with it, however, understands that
the work is not possible without now and then giving offense, without
causing discomfort or even pain, without provoking criticism. The journalist
also knows that however carefully he or she thinks out a course of action,
the approach or execution may turn out to be dead wrong. It’s not
surprising that so many journalists turn to strong drink and are unfit
to be around.
The conscientious journalist, in short, is not immune from the uncertainties,
the conflicting values, the likelihood of error that are part of the daily
possibilities of every man and woman. The reason for this is that journalism
is not an end in itself but grows out the larger life we experience as
human beings. If the end of journalism were journalism, then it would
be a self-contained enterprise, existing outside of society. But the end
of journalism is no more doing journalism than, say, the end of surgery
is only to cut people apart instead of saving lives.
The end of journalism, is to serve people in the most profound way possible.
As you will hear me say, over and over, all public policy has a human
effect. It will be your job to illuminate this and give your readers reliable
information, arrived at by backbreaking intellectual labor and formed
by judgment and guided by integrity, so that men and women can make the
decisions they need to live as free human beings.
So you will have to have intelligence and experience to do this kind of
work and also a sense of your own humanity. I simply do not believe that
bad people, in the way that Socrates might have used the words, can be
good journalists.
Whether you work in the news for 40 years as I did or whether you do it
for much shorter, the fact remains that you will be a journalist for only
a part of your life. But you will be a human being as long as you live,
and at the end of it all, the question of what kind of a journalist you
have been pales beside that of what kind of man, what kind of woman, you
were.
Regards, Bill Woo
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