The Trouble with Journalism

In my final year of high school I won an award for academic achievement.  In the weeks that followed the announcement of the award recipients, several local news outlets requested to interview me and feature me in their newspapers and television shows.  What I learned about the news media over that 2-week period has stayed with me ever since.  It revealed a side to the media that most readers and viewers have no clue exists. 

First I was to be featured in a news segment that would be aired on CHEX TV.  I remember walking into my second-period algebra class and a young woman, who was working as a presenter for the station, was already interviewing my teacher, causing her and her camera man to miss my entrance.  When she was done with the interview, she nonchalantly asked me to walk out of the room and walk back in so that she could get it on camera.  Then after the lesson had started she took me into the hallway and shot multiple takes of me just walking down the hall.  This all came as a shock to me, since I had no idea that the news was so staged.  Soon after I began noticing how commonplace this practice was.  Time after time, I’d see an interviewee walking alone through an idyllic garden and staring pensively into the distance.  The experience would permanently alter the lens through which I consume television news.

A few days after this, a photographer from the Toronto Star came to the school to shoot a picture of me that would be used in an article profiling me and the rest of that year’s crop of award recipients.  We went to the library and he asked me to sit in a chair and pretend to read a random book he had picked off the shelf.  It was only after the man had taken several photos that I realized, not only was I holding the book upside-down, but the whole thing was written in French.  Not that it would have been totally unbelievable that I might be interested in reading a French picture book on South American amphibians, but it was clear that authenticity wasn’t the primary objective of the photo shoot.

Just to mix it up, the photographer then had me look up from the book so that he could get some shots of me looking directly into the camera.  He instructed me to smile and I obliged to best of my ability.  I’m not sure why, but I’ve always been bad at smiling for pictures – probably because I’m a horrible actor and that’s generally what smiling for a picture entails.  They usually come out looking awkward and contrived, so as a policy I smile lightly and never show teeth.  But this wasn’t good enough for Mr. Toronto Star.  He wanted a big smile and kept begging me to smile harder.  Eventually I relented and jokingly flashed the biggest, goofiest colgate smile I could muster and I noticed him take the photo quickly.  I went back to my regular posture for a few last pics and we wrapped things up after that.  Before he left, I told him in no uncertain terms, “do not publish the picture with the over-the-top smile.”  I even explained to him my reasons for not wanting to be represented in that way and he assured me that I had nothing to worry about, and that he didn’t think he taken the picture in time to capture my temporary lapse in discipline.

Sure enough, when the article was published the following week, not only had they used the one picture I told them not to, but it was the biggest and most prominently placed of all the pictures in the article.  The picture was even worse than I had predicted.  Not only was the smile horrendous but my face was all up in the camera as though the lens had been 1 inch from my nose, making me look like that biggest geek to have ever walked the face of the Earth.  As an 18-year-old who was very concerned with my image, I was beyond furious.  To make matters worse, the article was posted on the bulletin board just inside the front entrance of the school for all to see.  Coincidently, one of the other award recipients attended the same high school as a friend of mine in Markham and I found out from her that the article was also put up in the library of her school.

In hindsight, these infractions seem relatively minor, but they represent a trend that I find to be endemic among journalists.  The vast majority of journalists are interested in one thing, and one thing only, and that’s the story, or more precisely, the narrative they’re trying to present.  In order to preserve and portray that narrative in the most neatly packaged manner they will gladly stage scenes, disregard or misrepresent facts, and throw people under the bus.

Take, for example, British-born, New York-based journalist, Martin Bashir.  Bashir became famous after making a 2003 documentary about Michael Jackson, in which he portrayed the singer as a creepy pedophile using what many at the time recognized to be extremely manipulative questioning.  Some observers believe the humiliation of this experience accelerated Jackson’s dependence on drugs and his overall downward spiral, which ultimately lead to his death.  Then in one of the most duplicitous displays ever seen on TV, reporting from the ABC studio where he now works, Bashir recorded a statement in which he expressed sorrow for the loss of Michael Jackson and claimed that he didn’t believe Jackson’s actions were criminal. 

Shortly after the original documentary aired in 2003, Jackson released a rebuttal documentary containing outtakes from Bashir’s interviews.  This version painted much different picture from the one depicted by Bashir.  One Youtube commenter who’d seen both documentaries, posted this in the comment section of the youtube clip showing Bashir’s recent about-face.

In the outtakes, as in the main doc, Bashir is, for lack of a better word, creepy. He baits Jackson, praising his strangest qualities during breaks in the filming. Jackson is flattered and pleased, but when filming resumes, Bashir then attacks the singer for the traits he only seconds earlier complimented.

The image concocted by Bashir was part of a larger narrative surrounding Michael Jackson that had been dominating media coverage of the star at the time.  The idea was that Jackson was this incredibly bizarre, oblivious, narcissistic pervert, and any facts that contradicted this narrative were glossed over or omitted entirely.  In the end, Bashir was rewarded with a job at ABC news for his distortions.

One of the best illustrations of this phenomenon took place during the 2008 Democratic primary elections between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  Clinton’s supporters were adamant that the mainstream media had it out for their candidate and were in the tank for Obama.  Many alleged that the media intentionally and disproportionately presented negative stories about Clinton in order to sabotage her campaign.  Though, I’ve never been a fan of Clinton and I’m convinced that she deserved all her negative press for the sheer immorality of the campaign she ran, I concede that her supporters may have a point, although I think they’re wrong about the media’s motivation.

Beginning with the allegations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton in the 90’s (although the allegations and the misconduct began long before that), the mainstream media has consistently depicted Bill Clinton as a slick-talking villain.  When Hillary joined the campaign to defame the women who had brought legitimate allegations against her husband, she also became a villain and was reviled by both men and women across the political spectrum.  (In fairness, I believe that a portion of her negative image stemmed from the fact that she was an educated, ambitious woman in stark contrast to Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan and that didn’t play well with America’s chauvinist sensibilities.)

In addition, Obama had become a messiah-like figure who made white Americans feel comfortable in their neo-liberalism, and confident that they had moved passed the racism of decades past.  But the media’s allegiance was to the narrative and not the candidate as we found out in March 2008, when a youtube clip of Obama’s minister Jeremiah Wright surfaced.  The clip showed Wright giving a sermon to his congregation at the church that the Obama’s attended at the time, although Obama was not in the pews on that particular Sunday.  In the sermon, Wright railed against, among other things, racism in America and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.  At one point Wright, proclaims, “God damn America!” which many observers found to be treasonous.  The preacher also accused the United States government of inventing the AIDS virus in order to kill African Americans.

Immediately the narrative shifted from the lying and conniving of Hillary Clinton to the racist, radical and downright insane tirades of Obama’s beloved pastor.  The coverage was non-stop and it had some people speculating that Obama’s campaign was doomed.  Almost no one in the mainstream media bothered to mention the fact that Wright had also advised President Bill Clinton, or that much of what Wright said was, well, right.  America was and is racist.  Israel is engaging in an illegal and inhumane occupation of Palestine.  Additionally, even though the assertion that AIDS was designed to kill Blacks is a false and insidious accusation, it at least bears mentioning that these accusations are rooted in the very real history of the American government’s targeting of Blacks.  Much of Black America’s mistrust of the government has been provoked by the actions of the government itself, such the Tuskegee experiment, which was only terminated one generation ago, and which makes the AIDS allegation sound almost plausible.  But discussing these things wouldn’t have fit the prevailing narrative, so the public was left to find this out for themselves.

This single-minded devotion to the story above all has spawned an inverted system of ethics in which it’s okay to screw over innocent human beings if it will make the story that much more juicy.  This is partly because the job of the reporter often calls for taking complex issues and dumbing them down to a sanitized form for consumption by the lowest common denominator among the viewing/reading public.  As a result, nuances and complexities are thrown out the window at the expense of truth.  Add to the mix the corporate and political agendas that are always operating behind the scenes and you have a recipe for one of the most Machiavellian and mercenary professions in existence.  And that’s the trouble with journalism.

AlexsJenkins