is journalistic truth dead?
the death of empathy
I spent my last few days in Chicago stuffing myself with food and thinking about and talking about journalism, with some old friends and also a current journalist. While there, a 6-year-old was stabbed to death by a landlord in an anti-Muslim attack. I discussed it briefly with my friends on Monday evening — we flinched and we murmured our thoughts and condolences, and then we moved on with our lives.
I experienced an overwhelming disgust at myself later that night, that I hadn’t felt more.
I began this Substack series with a somewhat vague overture toward the inevitability of framing in politics - whether that be in speeches, journalism, etc — and the consequent, public need to have the meta-discussion about framing, which I’ve tried to advance in future pieces. But exactly my self-disgust at that aforementioned moment is why the discussion around journalism deserves a much more specific and detailed treatment than I afforded it the first time around. I’m hoping to use the intellectual framework I established this semester to do so.
There are two major relevant pillars of journalism that I’d like to contrast:
Objective news journalism - talking to people on the ground about their experience, reporting on the facts and the situation. Elevate facts and lived experience as truth, as something to care about.
Political commentary and punditry - hearing people state their (often passionate and rhetorically stylish) opinions on an ongoing political issue. Elevate narratives and interpretations of facts.
I find the second more entertaining and convenient, which makes me like most people, which is exactly the problem.
The fomer can be deeply humanizing — with direct emotion and an ethos of rawness, the “been there, done that.” The empty stomachs and empty souls and empty hearts.
The later can be horribly infectious — the line between “here is my opinion” and “here is what you should think” is blurry. Rhetoricians and mind-melders can use word poetry and clever framing to convince you like you could never believe. They can use identity as a wedge piece. They might concede that all attention is good, even if it steps on toes and shaves off the truth.
The movement away from objective news journalism and toward the-anything-but is correspondent with the death of our empathy.
Political punditry is a direct, farm-to-table “journalistic” service that is convenient in two ways:
It tells us exactly what to get riled up about. We don’t need to go looking for the objective news journalism; we can just listen to the pundits who have clearly done more work than we can afford to process and opine.
Punditry keeps us one more degree of separation away from every atrocity that is going on in the world, numbing us to the pain of the people around us. No one wants to hear that the chicken they are eating for dinner was once thriving on the farm before its head got cut off unceremoniously.
To take a topical example: I have found it difficult in recent days to read and listen to direct live testimony of the war between Israel and Hamas, the stories coming out of the Be’eri Kibbutz in Israel and their counterparts in Gaza. I tried to listen and couldn’t get to the end. It is hard to listen.
Doomscrolling hurts our mental health and it hurts journalists’ mental health.
And yet this mental suffering is an infinitesimally small sampling of the pain currently felt by innocent civilians in Israel and Gaza.
It is very easy, in the current abundance of choice and scarcity of time in our society, to shirk the responsibility to empathize fully, to take the direct farm-to-table. It is easier to read and listen to opinions instead of raw stories.
But we do have a responsibility to listen and learn and grieve. When we are passive about doing so, the commentary and punditry we consume might manufacture care. But the highest form of empathy comes from the sharing of raw, unquestionably “true” stories.
I worry we are heading toward our worst, where the commentary of the holier-than-thou need not compete against the most enshrined pillar of our humanity — the sharing of story — for our attention. Because this story-telling has already started to die out from our consciousness:
Over the past few decades, more than 2,000 newspapers across the country have closed, leaving many communities without a reliable source of local information — PBS
This phenomenon narrows the space of issues whose existence we are even privy to, important and consequential issues that are worth speaking for. It also restricts our creativity in finding a solution. The people closest to suffering are often by painful necessity those who are most clear-headed about what must change to end their suffering. Censoring their stories and replacing them with second-hand and third-hand speculation is counterproductive and disrespectful.
After the first shooting at UNC I was compelled to write on this Substack about my experience. The coverage by the Daily Tar Heel got national press attention because its raw storytelling re-awakened the empathy that we all have in abundance, but that (I’d argue) is invoked very rarely. It became visible all the way to the President of the United States. Biden pledged to do all he could, and he created an office specifically dedicated against gun violence at the end of the following month.
But why didn’t the multiple-per-day shootings in Durham, for example, create the same impact? Durham local journalism is not very strong — and so the issue is unconscious to Duke students. But our neighboring school down the road? We should talk about them, says the Duke Chronicle. Consider the strong solidarity with a college rival, and also consider the loud silence around the community gated off from Duke’s borders, and ask yourself what truly is the difference.
In Chicago, the Highland Park shooting dominates the national consciousness. But not the everyday gun violence in the dark streets south of this high-income suburb. What truly is the difference?
Our rawest transmissions of empathy have the best chance of inducing action, real action.
When we allow people who live distanced far from tragedy, as many of us do, to shape the journalistic narrative, we might nod in agreement or stop to consider the breadth or depth of said tragedy. We might murmur thoughts and prayers. We might become passionate enough to vote. But to act takes some true intentionality.
We can’t wait for everyone to be directly exposed to gun violence and homelessness and healthcare insecurity for us to collectively decide we should actually do something about it, because we’ll all be screwed by then.
Raw story is one way, the way, in which we might experience suffering together in a way that compels us to demand that the worst that has happened to us does not happen to anyone, anymore. Without it, we are really not much more than headless chickens who sometimes stumble into polling booths.