Local Man

Novelists often say their job is tougher than ever because today’s world is so abundantly strange. How could their own imaginations dream up scenarios mind-boggling enough to compete with 9/11, nanorobots, the Internet, Mars landings, global warming, human cloning?

Journalists have a similar problem, but for us it’s not just the strangeness of today’s world. It’s the fact there’s so much of it. There’s the old Irish joke that Ireland produces more history than it can consume locally. The world is now producing more facts than journalists can process, or their readers, either.

There are too many people on the earth today. And too many cars. Too much junk food, too many safety-wrapped action toys, too many crops planted with too much fertilizer, too many tourists in the rainforests, too many driftnets in the Pacific Ocean, too many people in prison, too many e-mails, too many blogs, too many terrorists, too many brands of fancy mustard, too many factory-farmed chickens, too many movies, too many celebrities, too much diabetes, too many iPods, too many Wal-Marts, too many scary germs, too many loose nukes.

Muchness Looms

Here on my desk, I have too many books about how there is too much of everything. I’ve got ”Enough” by Bill McKibben, ”Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser, ”Born to Buy” by Juliet Schor, ”Media Unlimited” by Todd Gitlin, ”Hooked” by Stephanie Kaza, ”Our Final Hour” by Martin Rees, ”Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman, ”Runaway World” by Anthony Giddens, ”World on Fire” by Amy Chua, and ”Collapse” by Jared Diamond.

It’s tough enough to study up on one’s local watershed, make friends in immigrant neighborhoods, keep track of who’s running for city council, and maybe develop special expertise, just a layer deeper than superficial, in one local issue of importance – schools, roads, health, recycling, whatever.

How does one tackle the muchness of the globe when the muchness of our states, cities, neighborhoods, and even our homes at times seems too much?

Muchness looms and threatens another way, too. Deeply credible writers like the ones above are shouting full-throated to the world that the ship of humanity is going down, and fast. They’re working from facts.

Working Stiffs

Martin Rees is Great Britain’s Astronomer Royal, for heaven’s sake, a sober Cambridge professor who’s won every astronomy prize in the world for discovering how stars, black holes, and galaxies are formed. Rees surveys the risks the world faces today and concludes that humanity at best a 50/50 chance of surviving this century. This century!

Who has ever heard of Martin Rees, or the other writers either? Try Googling Martin Rees, and then Jessica Simpson. What the hell is wrong with us?

Our prophets’ voices are being smothered by the very muchness they describe.

Working stiff journalists feel like they’re shouting in an engine room, too. As, I’m sure, doctors and teachers and computer programmers and everyone, in their own way, feels while feeding their respective beasts of bottomless appetites.

Sometime in the middle 1990’s, I was wandering through the newsroom of The New York Times and spotted, pinned to a cubicle wall, a note that had been written to desk editors by the Time’s chief editor for layout and writing style.

The top editor had torn an average page from the daily paper and scrawled across the top in green felt tip pen: ”We are drowning our readers in words!”

Verbal Smog

So the mandarins of the mass media, the ones with their hands on the throttle, know what’s happening, know the part they play in adding to our world’s too-muchness. That memo at the Times was as if William Ford Jr., the chairman of the company that bears his name, had sent an e-mail message to the entire Ford workforce saying: ”We are killing our customers with our cars!”

Yet I haven’t noticed, in the years since my newsroom visit, that the average amount of ink spilled at the Times, or anywhere in the media, has declined even a smidge. To the contrary, add the impact of the Internet, Web sites, blogs, e-mails and other electronic media and the amount of wordage has exploded.

The literary critic Northrop Frye, in the 1950s, said that a poisonous verbal smog was beginning to envelop the world, thanks to the advent of public relations, government conducted by pseudo-event, and the replacement of ideas by entertainments conveyed in books, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio.

The global discourse beginning to take shape back then looked promising to some people, such as Frye’s fellow Canadian, Marshall McLuhan. He thought that global communication would usher in a global village of prosperity and peace.

Endless Loop

But Frye warned that appearances are deceiving:  ”The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single worldwide effort, but it’s really a deadlock of rivalries. It looks very impressive, except that it has no human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it’s really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears.”

As a journalist, writing for the mass media feels like you’re walking on that famous stairway drawn by M.C. Escher. It looks like it’s rising and rising, but in fact it’s an endless loop ascending to nowhere.

We journalists publish our stories — our sometimes important reports on the state of the world, our shouts of joy and our sentinel shouts of warning – onto that stairway. We think, we hope, they have a chance of rising up the steps into the halls of the people, and into the government halls of power.

But somehow, they never get there.

The world stays busted. And there’s more stuff than ever to fix.

I hereby coin (as far as I know I’m the first one to use it) the acronym TME to designate the companion and (until now) lesser known ailment to TMI, i.e. "too much information."

TME? Too much entertainment, of course.

Stay tuned for an anatomy, an etiology, an epidemiology, and other analytical looks at this brain- and soul-rotting condition.

Like any journalist, I see human suffering a lot. I’m attracted to it, I suppose, in the same way that doctors and social workers seek to encounter suffering, to try to understand it and lessen it.

Yet the more I think about suffering in relation to my profession, the more I think we don’t know much. There is a certain arrogance we journalists have about suffering. Not that we think ourselves above it, but rather that somehow, although we never sat down to think it through, we still think we understand suffering and its ways.

Here’s an example. An old journalist’s trick for getting good quotes in interviews is to keep silent during that awkward pause after a person has answered a question and is waiting for you to ask another question.

Usually the person blurts something out at that point just to fill the vacuum in the conversation. It’s not usually something he or she planned to say, which is exactly what makes it a good quote. It’s often self-revealing in a way the person never intended.

It is profoundly the right thing to do, of course, to listen carefully to what our sources tell us. That usually means not jumping in with a new question but rather to spend some time, instead, to reflect and to some extent empathize with what we have just heard.

But if it’s right to listen and empathize, is it right to grab the juicy bits a person blabs out in these unguarded moments and publish them? How exactly should we use the unguarded self-revelations we pride ourselves on extracting from our sources?

The more general question for journalists, then, is at what point are we extending suffering or cheapening suffering, instead of using our reflections and human empathy in more responsible ways?

Nature abhors a border. When you stay silent after a source asks a question, you are creating a border, and you are creating the impulse in your source to cross that border and thus come flowing into you, your ears and your soul. As often as not, what comes flowing into you are stories of suffering.

Maybe, just as we delay responding to a question in order to elicit better quotes, we might also delay writing and publishing our stories a little bit. We could take that time to process the stories of suffering that our sources tell us, and to reflect on our role as journalists in the great chain of global causes and effects of which we are a part. Then we might write better stories.

How much of our subject matter as journalists is human suffering! Of all the Pulitzer Prizes awarded each year, how many are stories or photographs of people struggling, people in horror, people in pain? If we removed every story about human suffering from our magazines and newspapers, how much paper would be left? Not enough to wrap a fish.

Yet how much do we as journalists really know about suffering, one of our most frequent and, for our readers, most popular subjects?

Can we responsibly deal with a subject about which we have no special expertise beyond what, perhaps, we have experienced personally ourselves?

Even in our own personal cases, though, have we handled suffering well? Does the fact that we have suffered personally make us somehow expert at translating the suffering of others into words and images that later, when they are read in a newspaper or viewed on a television screen, radiantly flower in the imaginations and souls of millions of others?

Do we really understand this process? When and how does suffering become entertainment? How can we be journalists if we can’t answer this basic question? If we are uncertain of our skills in this area, how come we stride into the public square so confidently day after day to interview people, and then publish stories made from pieces of their pain?

The best medical training includes lessons for physicians on how to deal internally with the suffering of their patients. A doctor skilled in these methods helps patients play an active role in their own recovery.

The best training for police, hospice workers, nurses, relief aid and social workers includes similar kinds of lessons. Because journalists also meet people at crisis points in their lives, maybe we could learn from the caring professions about how to handle the suffering of our sources in a compassionate and helpful way.

It struck me while remaking The McGill Report home page yesterday, that glocal journalism really has its roots in several journalism genres and practices. The obvious one of course is localizing an international story — interviewing the families of soldiers overseas, the local Haitian immigrant when a hurricane hits Haiti, etc. But another one is ethnic journalism, which is local minorities writing about their lives and issues. Outside of the ethnic newspapers, this is generally relegated to occasional columns in daily mainstream papers. Another of the roots of glocal journalism is the tradition to follow the money. All that glocal journalism says is follow the money overseas, such as by finding out where local businesses outsource, hire global talent from, and find markets to export their goods. I’ll bet with some thought we could find many more journalism practices that only need to be extended to become "glocal." Ideas anybody?