Communication 273
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Memo to the class:
A few classes ago, I mentioned how one of my predecessors on the police beat at the Kansas City Times was Ernest Hemingway. I also told you how Rick Bragg of the New York Times says you shouldn't treat your beat as if you were on safari. Bragg's point brought this passage from Hemingway to mind. Hemingway was on safari. He shot the sable and the kudu, and afterward there was beer and whiskey and talk around the campfire. I have never been on safari, but I will take Hemingway's word that this is what happens. I do know that if you do your journalism like this, you get precisely what Rick Bragg warns against. The journalistic equivalent of shooting big game on safari is to use up your source thoroughly and ruthlessly. You track the person down and catch him in your notebook as carefully and coldly as if you had him in the sights of a rifle. Later, you can boast how you broke the source's neck with one carefully placed question. Just as Hemingway had great affection for animals he killed, particularly if they were brave, even the most exploitative reporters can develop relationships with their sources. Those actually may be may be quite close. But just as Hemingway did not allow his feelings for the animals to keep him from killing them, reporters on safari do not allow their friendships with sources to interfere with using them up. The hunter's trophy goes to the taxidermist; the reporters' go into the paper. Not all reporters on safari take such callous advantage of people, but those who do are inadequate both as journalists and human beings. They care about people not as people but as objects or means to an end, which often is their own gratification. Good journalists, I think, heed the sermon preached by the 17th century poet John Donne, in which he said no man is an island, entire of itself. Good reporters are involved in mankind. They consider themselves not an island but a part of the main, the continent. They know that when the bell tolls, it tolls for them. If you are not involved with people, ultimately you will not know much about yourself. You will not set off on those deep expeditions into the interior where all the light that is there comes from reflecting upon your experiences. Good journalism teaches us about the world and in doing so it teaches us about ourselves. So journalists on safari, whether big game hunters or accidental tourists, are just passing through. They are untouched by their encounters, unchanged by their experiences. That is what Bragg meant when he said: "Go eat outside the mill. Have some macaroni and cheese and lima beans and cornbread sticks. You cannot treat your beat as if you were on safari; you have to go out and soak it up. …Take a walk through the Kmart. That's where the people are living. . . . " If you lack empathy, you can eat cornbread every night and walk through hundreds of Kmarts without becoming wiser. If you have empathy but do your reporting by phone or limit it to the usual sources or confine yourself to official reports, your stories may provide information but they will never illuminate. But even if we get out of the office and go to the scene, even if we are observing, listening, interviewing, getting the full story is terribly difficult. There are always pressures of time and space -- time to do the story and space in which to tell it. We journalists are always moving on. We arrive on the scene after the fact and we leave as soon as the story is "over." There is rarely much opportunity to have learned about the situation beforehand, and our brief attention span prevents us from lingering to look deeper into people and events. But if you do, it can be one of the most enriching experiences of your life. Let me tell you about one of them. Once, while I was the editor of the Post-Dispatch, I read an item about a little boy named Stanley Turner who had been electrocuted while playing outside his house. There were some exposed wires at the base of a street lamp and playfully he had touched them. I had small boys at the time, and like all children, they too were both curious and oblivious to dangers that lay all around. The little dead boy lived in the inner city, and I drove out to the house and knocked. His mother's name was Pollie Turner, and when she answered the door I told her who I was and asked if she would tell me about her son. She invited me in to one of the cleanest homes I have ever seen. We sat at her dining room table, and after we had talked a little I asked if I might take some notes so that I could write a column about Stanley. Pollie Turner was a widow and little Stanley was the joy of her life. On the night he died, she had been at work, cleaning up for sick people at a hospital. She took me to Stanley's room and it was exactly as he left it -- sports posters on the wall, stuffed Ninja Turtles on the bed. Pollie Turner could barely speak. Her grief was so heavy that it seemed to have crushed the life out of her. She had called the electric company many times about the wires, but nobody ever came to look at them. Indignant, I started a little crusade, and reporters found there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of light poles with exposed wires all over St. Louis. At first, city officials were indifferent, but slowly, with stories and editorials pressuring them, they began to act. The light poles were fixed. I kept up with Pollie Turner. I drove her to the cemetery to visit Stanley's grave. We talked by phone. And then one day her grandson was killed by a fire that swept through the little apartment where he lived with his parents, her son and daughter-in-law. So again I went to see Pollie and as we talked, I asked again if I could put what she said into the paper. She asked me to go to her son's apartment because people were saying he had been smoking in bed. I did, and poked through the dark, wet, sooty, acrid remains of a home, and wrote what I found. The real reason the boy died is that they were too poor to have a phone. By the time the father had run up and down the block, trying to get someone to call the fire department, the apartment was engulfed in flames. Pollie Turner and I continued to keep talk to each other. In time she seemed to be regaining her strength. But she was like Job, to whom every bad thing happened; and one night her eldest son was shot and killed by a security guard at a dance hall. She was sure her son was unarmed and begged me to go to the police. I talked to the detective in charge and she, a mother herself, assured me they would look into everything. That was all I could tell Pollie Turner. So what is the significance of all this? Very little, I suppose, other than the fact that the time I spent with Pollie Turner changed me. I came to better understand the faith and strength and fears of people who live in circumstances far removed from mine -- and from most of my readers. I would like to think that the many pieces I wrote about her gave some people a fuller sense of the world. If you treat the people you write about with respect, if you are genuinely
interested in them, you will be rewarded over and over in your life as
a journalist. You will become a different person. If you use them up and
discard them, you will never understand what you have missed. Regards, Bill Woo
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