Keyhole Journalism

Lawrence Wright has a short piece in The New Yorker this week--a commentary on America's latest culture war. For those not familiar with Wright, he's the the author of the masterful, 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning (for non-fiction) The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. I mention it because last night I happened to be rereading a 2003 Q & A with Wright, which was conducted while he was writing The Looming Tower). Some parts of the 2003 interview strike me as relevant to larger discussions on this blog that have touched on the role of journalists in the climate debate. Q: What elements do you look for in a story? Wright: I like stories that are keyholes into a huge room. At first my stories often seem very small and confined. But when you put your eye down and look through it, it is a tiny window on an enormous universe. Q: How would you describe your reportorial persona? Wright: I think of a reporter as a professional witness. His job is to report on conflict, and then return to his community to tell them what is happening and what the community ought to do about it. But the default position for the reporter is usually impartial neutrality--at least for me. Q: There's an incredible moment in your profile of Walter Railey, the Methodist minister in Dallas who is suspected of killing his wife. You tell tell him, "I think you're guilty...Confess or it will haunt you forever, it will drive you crazy." That doesn't sound very impartial or netural to me. Wright: I just couldn't maintain a dispassionate stance with him. But I don't think a reporter should allow his humanity to be compromised. If you're in a situation that's fundamentally wrong you have to make a stand. Sure, you're a "witness," but you're also a represenative of your community. You represent what the community wants to know, which means you sometimes have to abandon neutrality in order to elicit the response your reader is waiting to hear. In the case of Walter Railey, most people in Dallas knew, or believed, that he was guilty. By challenging him directly, I gave him an opportunity to respond to the question everyone wanted to ask. Q: Do you believe that journalism can lead to truth? Wright: Truth is one of those subjective terms that are pointless to get too tied up about. "Truth" has this absolute quality, and yet everybody hangs on to his own truth. A better word might be "understanding." The whole point of a reporter is to sympathize with different perspectives. But I don't think sympathy leads to truth. For instance, in the recovered memory debate, there was more truth on the side of those who said, "This is an hysterical outbreak," than on the side of those who said, "No, these people are suffering from real memories and experiences." I felt obligated to report on what I believed, while trying to understand both camps. Another example is the 9/11 book I'm working on. Three thousand people dead and two civilizations are locked in a violent conflict. Virtually everybody claims to have access to the "the truth," and a number of them are even willing to die for it. I can't presume to say that my truth is any truer than their truth. But I do have a stance, and I do think that as a journalist I can help the reader understand the conflicting beliefs. The problem I have with the word "truth" is that it sounds very simple. And when things get simple, they get dangerous--they don't get easier. We're sliding toward an era of radical simplicity: good versus evil, us versus them, etc. The reporter's job in such a situation is to complicate the issue because complexity leads to more understanding whereas simplicity creates stereotypes.