Some Reflections on Journalism
By Roger Cohen
March 30, 2018
When I was young and in Buenos Aires, fair city, melancholy city, a friend said to me: “Journalism’s a cheap shot for you.” I never asked what she meant but I never forgot it either. I think she meant that journalism tends to stop where artistic creation begins, and that is the realm of deeper truths.
Buenos Aires was awakening to the scope of a national nightmare. Every conversation seemed to end in tears as parents, haunted by terrible imaginings, recalled their children who had been “disappeared” by the military junta. That many of the thousands of corpses were dumped from planes into the Atlantic between 1976 and 1983 was not yet known.
I sat and listened. That’s what journalists do: listen through silences, awaiting a clue. Students summoned by police for questioning (“shouldn’t take more than a half-hour”), never to be seen again. Students bundled into Ford Falcons on Avenida Corrientes. Pregnant women killed only after delivering babies that childless military couples would take.
Argentina, so rich, so plundered, was haunting. Buenos Aires, in its elegance, reminded me of Flaubert’s remark about style, that it’s “the discharge from a deeper wound.” Distance weighed on Argentines. It was a form of banishment.
I told the story in the way that seemed most revealing to me: from within the anguish of the people I met. The intersection of personal and national psyches has always constituted the richest point of journalistic inquiry for me.
I stuck to what I knew. But facts can be inadequate. I recall two people, a man and a woman, seated at a restaurant in war-ravaged Beirut. The waiters folded the linen napkins with great care, a small act of defiance. Yes, that was verifiable. But what was passing between the couple, what inhabited the small magical space separating their fingertips, and how had it momentarily blotted out the shelling?
The war was one thing, wartime another. It may be debated where the greater truth lay. As Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist, once put it, “Facts at times become the dire enemies of truth.” Picasso’s “Guernica” is a poor factual account of what happened in a Basque village on April 26, 1937, and a magnificent rendering of what has happened in every village that was ever bombed in any war. The painting is a perfect journalistic dispatch, if measured by how much universal truth it contains.
That, however, is not what journalists are about most of the time. Their realm is facts. Stubborn facts, the kind that bring down governments, usher barbarians to judgment. We are living a great journalistic flowering, provoked by the contempt for the truth, and often for the Constitution, of Donald Trump’s White House. In the unending task of keeping the Republic, journalists have made a difference.
Perhaps that’s what it comes down to: making a difference, in some small but important way. Sure, journalism can be a “cheap shot” when it’s self-congratulatory, or voyeuristic, smug or shallow. (“Fake news” is not journalism.) The journalist evokes suffering and moves on; the suffering tends to endure.
There’s a moment in the movie “Gandhi,” when the fictional New York Times correspondent, Vince Walker, having witnessed the brutal British assault on a nonviolent protest by Gandhi supporters at the Dharasana Salt Works, phones in his dispatch. He’s sweating, under pressure, close to tears, as he communicates the last graph: “Whatever moral ascendancy the West held was lost here today. India is free for she has taken all that steel and cruelty can give, and she has neither cringed nor retreated.”
It’s all there: the head and the heart fused, lucidity and emotion, a nudge to history from a correspondent bearing witness. To be there at the cusp of change is a rare gift. Everything in journalism has changed except the essential.
When I was very young, I’d go to the Kruger National Park in South Africa. It seemed nature was slow, with sudden bursts of acceleration. Nothing moved as the heat of the day rose. Then the air quickened. An eagle soared, elephants charged. Life then was a question of waiting and timing. It might idle for several years before packing several into a single one.
Journalism is like that, lulls and accelerations, adrenaline and troubled questioning. What do I recall? Finding two of those stolen Argentine children in Paraguay, being there at Pinochet’s downfall, chronicling the Bosnian war until at last NATO intervened, giving voice to brave Iranians in 2009: the moments when words seem vital.
This week, after a botched attempt at an execution last month, the State of Alabama and lawyers for Doyle Lee Hamm reached a private settlementthat will spare his life. I’d written a column called “Death Penalty Madness in Alabama.” Bernard Harcourt, Hamm’s lawyer, told me, “Without your piece, I don’t think we’d be where we are today. It made all the difference.”
A single life saved, that feels like enough for a lifetime, even if the novel is yet to come.
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