David Halberstam died yesterday. I already did my journalism
biography report on IF Stone, but ten years from now, lucky students of
JOMC 242 can write about Halberstam's great contribution to the real
journalistic profession. He was part of what may be a dying breed.
I'm too lazy to collect his wisdom myself, but
Glenn Greenwald has a good start. From a 2005 speech:
One
of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better
you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less
popular you are likely to be. [...]
It's not about fame. By and large,
the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are. Besides,
fame does not last. At its best, it is about being paid to learn. For
fifty years, I have been paid to go out and ask questions. What a great
privilege to be a free reporter in a free society, to be someone whose
job is a search for knowledge.
Such is often said and repeated in various forms, but I suspect few
"journalists" actually grasp the true gravity of these words. We
all like to criticize our own and tout the nobleness of our "obligation
to society" and endeavour to find truth. But to do so, we must
first understand the world in which we live. There are two major
consequences of our new digital age: 1) a never-ending supply of media
for connecting to others, and 2) an ever-increasing number of platforms
with which to transfix and publicize our individual identities.
It is scary to think that as we move into this increasingly
technological world that while we can connect in so many ways, we are
at the same time each forming our own realities - our own unique
renditions of the truth. We are all isolating ourselves.
There has been an idea around for millenia that truth is objective and finite,
that though it may not be easily and readily known, it can be
discovered. This idea still drives our world today - in science,
in history, in society. It is the fundamental tenet of
journalistic philosophy: Find the truth and expose it to the
world. Who ignores it, alters it and tries to covers it up? - The
government and those with power. Technology gives even the most
common people power. The vast reach of the internet provides an
enormous source of validation for people to assert themselves in a way
they never could before. Amid the squabbling of billions of
individual realities, where is the truth? Will the new millenium
operate under a new idea, that truth is no longer something to be
sought, but rather something to be crafted according to our own ideas
and individualism?
In the famous words of a senior White House official in the Bush
administration who reportedly said to Ron Suskind, the traditional
concept of truth belongs in the old "reality-based community," where
people "believe that solutions emerge from...judicious study of
discernible reality."
We're
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and
that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all
of you, will be left to just study what we do.
The neoconservative movement may soon be dead, but its conception of
reality might not go with it. Down at the individual level, if we
are all our own one-man empires putting our own realities out there,
what happens to the journalistic profession? If truth becomes
subjective - indeed, created - then how can one possibly make a living
off the pursuit of knowledge and uncovering the truth?
