One morning last year, not long after the publication of my first book, Absolute Convictions, I paid what turned out to be an ego-deflating visit to Amazon. I went there to check the latest fluctuation in the ranking of my book, which, alas, had yet to land on the best-seller list. But the true source of disappointment lay elsewhere, in a review posted by a reader that was now on prominent display for all potential customers. Its author was not a professional critic but a pro-life advocate who’d apparently tracked down a copy of my book after hearing it described as an evenhanded, narrative account of the abortion controversy. Don’t be fooled, the review warned—I was anything but a neutral narrator.
Since I don’t subscribe to the notion that journalists can ever be entirely neutral, this was not a charge to which I could offer up much of a defense. I also doubt anyone would have accepted such a claim in this instance even if I were a believer in neutrality. The subject of my book is the abortion conflict that raged for several decades in Buffalo, New York, where I grew up and where my father, an abortion provider, found himself on the frontlines of the battle, weathering a wave of sit-ins, death threats, pickets, and mock funerals, followed by the actual funeral of a colleague of his named Barnett Slepian, who was murdered by an anti-abortion zealot in 1998. To pretend to narrate these events with equal sympathy for the people who’d supported my father through the years and the people who’d vilified and harassed him would have been preposterous.
Why, then, did the review on Amazon gnaw at me? In part because, like most reporters, I aspire to reach people on all sides of the issues...
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With the openness of blogs, and sites such as Facebook that have your personal information for all the world to see (LibraryThing, Shelfari, and Goodreads tell everyone what books you're reading; Last FM tells everyone what music you are listening to), there is little chance that journalists will be getting away with keeping their personal lives private much longer.
You now have an audience who put their lives on display and watch programs of people who put their lives on display. They will not likely trust a source who doesn't play fair and do the same.
Which is a good thing.
This is the reason I have changed the way I gather the news. So I started an experiment -- I have a news site that has the completed article, but my blog explains every step of the news gathering process -- the hits, the misses, what have you. But I have been open in every way imaginable. We all have to come from somewhere. People can see the world from my eyes and I make no apology for the way I see things, but at least people will know why I see things in the way that I do.
That's why people should be getting information from a lot of different sources, not just one.
But unless our profession seriously rethinks itself and the times that it lives in, we are in danger of closing ourselves off from the world -- and being no longer able to truthfully report about it as a result.
Posted by Alexandra Kitty
on Sat 22 Sep 2007 at 11:27 AM