Depressing, but it's my job. I work for a newspaper website and our visitors want death. Scandal, tragedy or perversion will do in a pinch but death is always the killer app for a multimedia information salesman.
People often malign journalists for being vultures and I guess in a way it's true. We are always picking over the ruins of somebody's life, be it death by assault rifle or death by arrest for poaching the company's retirement fund. Yet vultures won't be going out of business any time soon and you must admit, they're hardy little fellows. Did you know a vulture sanitizes itself by urinating over its legs and feet? Or that its primary defense mechanism is to projectile vomit into the face of its attacker?
Not a pleasant thought. But without vultures the world be a terrible place, awash in disease and corruption. While the vulture and its adaptions and its mission cause the gut to knot, it performs a vital, useful and even noble function: keeping things clean.
Besides, from the vulture's point of view it's not such a bad job. The vulture is exposed on an hourly basis to the most vile, repulsive, horror-inducing conditions this world can offer. Do that for a few weeks and you won't even hold your nose, much less your stomach.
My first day on the job, a scuba diver was run over by a charter boat. In my mind's eye I could see the madly whirring prop dicing his body into sushi-sized pieces, which washed ashore over the course of the next week. The reporters found great delight in this, though I can't remember any of their jokes. Maybe some involved sushi. But I do remember thinking: What ghouls these people are.
Two months later, when a murder victim's body was found buried head-first with its legs sticking out of the ground - legs that animals had gnawed the flesh from - I could only think: What dumbass would bury somebody head-first?
When you deal with scandal, tragedy, perversion and even death on an hourly basis, you don't smell it anymore. You aren't sickened by the sight of the blood-smeared drag marks, the comforter that covered the 14-year-old a coach fellated, or the bullet-spocked glass of a getaway car. You learn to set it aside because in some way, it isn't real. It's a 54-point headline across six columns, an online photo gallery, or maybe 50,000 more page views.
Doctors, nurses and EMTs know this. Firefighters know it. So do cops.
As do the vultures.
Today a 60-year-old man snapped. His neighbors were having a party and I guess he got tired of the noise. He went to their back door, cut a hole in the screen, let himself in, and opened fire with a rifle. He shot five people. Two are dead. One may yet die. Two others will probably live.
At one point in the morning I heard myself say, "Well, I guess that'll teach 'em to turn down the damn stereo."
As I sit here writing this, I feel my face burn with shame. How could I have said such a thing? So callous. So brutal. Almost as brutal as the crazy man's bullets.
And as I think about it a thought comes to mind. About years of listening to scanner calls about "signal 7's" - dead bodies. Or the person who jumped from a tree and his ring caught on a branch, "degloving" his hand. Or the dog that was thrown into a ditch and shot, leaving it paralyzed but alive. Or the man who was mowing grass next to a park lake and the lawnmower tipped over, pinning him under water and drowning him.
Maybe I have learned to laugh, because if I don't laugh I will cry, and if I cry I might lose my mind over the unbelievable violence and cruelty people inflict on one another.
Meanwhile life goes on, even for those circling overhead to pick at the ruins of tragedies unfolding below. I believe I am a compassionate person, and I perform a valuable service to mankind.
Depressing, but it's my job.
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Steve Blevins
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Tom Pantera
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Comments
Anyway, great post, sir. And don't be too hard on yourself. Laughter is the best medicine, even with the diseases are societal.
Now I deal with kids from small dailies and weekly (or should I say weakly) rags. I practically spoon feed them some of the stuff, replete with comments like, "If you put the pencil down, I'll explain it to you, but I don't want to have to watch what I say. When I'm done, you can pick the pencil back up, and ask me whatever you want."
I mean, I'll let you burn me once. :)
(Rated)
I think you're spot-on with this statement. And I don't think you're a ghoul.
Rated.
Your plea was obviously heart felt and eloquent. I would be a hard hearted bastard if I didn't admire your honesty. But I'm not sure about your thought process here or your conclusions.
First,
I wouldn't worry about feeling callous to tragedy. Hey, wake up, it's not YOUR tragedy. You have no moral obligation to get torn up about a situation or people whom your knew zilch about ten minutes earlier.
There's no way anyone should be expected to wrap their brains around this kind of tragedy. Stop feeling bad because you don't feel worse.
And lose the vulture metaphor. You're a human, and the parallels aren't close.
The reason murder and mayhem are so marketable, is because from a writing standpoint, they're so damn EASY. A villain, a victim, and an unambiguous ending ending. Poof! Story done.
And stop with this riduculous notion that journalists have some sort of ethical obligation to cover every cheap homicide or inhuman act.
99.9% of the time, it is not NEWS. It's titillation and affects no one but the immediate participants.
We're not talking about sweeping corruption under the rug or neglecting an expose' on the banking crisis for god's sake. Stop drinking the Koolaide.
Writing an interesting piece on something less sensational is actually takes a little more work to get the reader involved -and get hits or sell papers.
So I'm seeing media's "they only want gore" argument as a pretty convenient cop out. And "that's just the way it is" is even more pathetic. Does that mean that nothing will ever change? No matter how loathsome?
IMO, though, in another 20 years, it really won't matter much because that generation of new news readers will have been exposed and enjoyed such a wider spectrum of "news" from electronic sources, that traditional "bleed leads" will go like the dinosaur.
I think you should have taken the time you spent blogging this mea culpa, and written one good lead that might lead "news" in another direction.
Regards,
RH
Here's one you may have heard about, or not. Talk about depressing. Shut Up Or I'll Shoot You.
I too used to be a radio news reporter/anchor, so I know the value of "if it bleeds, it leads."
I held that gig until my news director made me call the widow of a plane-crash victim--who hadn't yet been told that she was a widow. I'll remember that scream for the rest of my life.
I couldn't take it, so I got out of the business. Still, I admire people like yourself who do what they must. It's still news, and you're still the "gatekeeper" for the rest of us who look to you for the facts.
Hang tough, my man. Somebody's gotta do it...
I worked as a cop reporter for two years and then as a court reporter for a tabloid for 3 years in two crime-ridden cities. There is very little about humanity that surprises me. I have learned to stay away from kitchens -- most domestic violence occurs there.
When I was a cub reporter in Montreal, and the only female working news side, my initiation was to have dozens of colour pictures of Quebecois criminal Richard Blass, "le Chat," known for his numereos escapes from police, shot dozens of times by cops after being trapped in a country farm house, strewn across my desk. Let's just say that the least offensive of them caused my roommate to run to the bathroom to throw up.
There is nothing like cops and courts to season a journalist. It's where I learned to take detailed notes, pay attention, and observe how the judicial system does/doesn't work. It was the most heartbreaking and breathless time of my life.
There are still cases and people that haunt me. The savagery of human beings still beggars my soul all these years later.
First, I wasn't feeling bad about somebody else's tragedy. I was feeling bad about joking about it, which led me to wonder if some part of my humanity had gone missing. You can't look at another's suffering and not feel at least a pang of sympathetic dread, can you?
I didn't come up with the vulture metaphor. It's how the outside world describes journos - I borrowed it.
I agree - a well-thought, interestingly written piece about something that isn't "bleeding" can make fascinating reading. Magazines do it every month. But newspapers are published every day, and filling 48 pages of newshole with depth pieces isn't going to happen - it ain't possible.
Where you and I seriously part company is your assertion newspapers go for the easy shot - "if it bleeds it leads." I can see the readership numbers rolling in minute by minute and I know what people are reading. I plan to blog about it later on - stay tuned.
Meanwhile I thank you for your post. You're a damn good writer.
I was a two-way street reporter for years, and crash-and-burn was my specialty. By the time I turned 21, I'd already seen more death and destruction than I can remember. I lived for the 3 a.m. wake-ups from police, fire or ambulance contacts.
I loved my job.
I don't want to criticize you. But I do want to call attention to some aspects of reporting I think you've overlooked. Taken as a critique of journalism, I think your post left a good bit out of the picture. Here's some of what I would add:
You hear that signal 7 and you go flying out the door, trying to find the place where the car went off the road, the neighbor went batshit, the baby's body was found. You work your sources. Knock on doors. Sweet talk strangers. Ask stupid questions. Hope for better answers. You try to put the pieces together despite official intransigence and the ever-looming deadline. Twisted as it may sound to anyone outside the business, this is what reporters live for. Life and death. It's a rush and there's no need to justify or rationalize it.
You left all that out, Del. You left out what happens after you report the story -- writing it plain and simple at first, just the facts m'am, building context for the folo, plumbing the reasons or lack thereof behind the story, watching the perp walk or attending the funeral and yeah, choking up when they close the casket lid or throw the rose into the open grave. That's all part of the job too. In all but the rarest cases, these stories aren't about the dead but the living -- the survivors, the injured, even the shooters.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Ungodly as the world may appear when hell is breaking loose, a good reporter tries to make sense of what's happened. If it looks easy, it isn't. If it's easily dismissed by ideologues and media theorists, so be it. As a reporter, you're a professional. And you do yourself and your profession a disservice by describing the work you do as "a multimedia information salesman."
I'm not a cop reporter (I'm guessing you're not either). But I've covered plenty of stories as sensationally horrendous as the ones you describe and I've never come away with a feeling of self-disgust for covering them (though theexperience has sometimes been disheartening). Nor have I felt disdain for people who read those stories. Every such story has been, at its core, a story about something more than the stuff vultures concern themselves with. People want to read these stories because they'redramatic. They're about life and death. But mostly they're about life.
I could tell you about the shopping mall customer who saved a young man's life when another young man shot up a local shopping mall. Or about the 10-year-old girl who saved her aunt's life by steering a motorboat to safe harbor after the aunt was slashed by the boat's propeller. Or the comic book artist who was paralyzed from the shoulders down in a car accident 10 years ago and who has since worked for Marvel.
That woman I didn't want to interview back in the day? She was eager to see me, eager to talk about her husband, what a great guy he was. She laughed and cried. So did I. She called me later to thank me for letting her tell her story. It's happened again and again over the years.
That's the thing about I love about journalism. The minute you think you know how people are going to react, the minute you give in to that been-here, done-that feeling, you make the call, you knock on the door, and people surprise you. They invite you in, into their homes, their lives, their families. They give you something and you get a chance to give it to others. Doesn't happen all the time, I grant you, but it happens enough -- and usually in the direst circumstances -- to keep me believing in the value of what I do
Maybe I'm romanticizing here. Journalism may be the last refuge of the romantic. Or maybe I'm just over-compensating for what I see as an unbalanced version of a job I'm very familiar with and a profession I'm proud of belonging to. I don't know.
I think, at the end of your post, you hit on the truth of the matter. As a reporter, you said you believe "I perform a valuable service to mankind." You're right, Del. You DO perform a valuable service to mankind -- a more valuable service than you appear to realize.
So I moved on to be a specialist financial reporter - if you need an expert on bird flu or the insurance implications of Yellowstone going kablooie, I'm your man! (That's a good thing, all that knowledge.... isn't it?)
We're ghouls, too, but we don't have to actually face what feeds us.
The most fun I've ever had at work was on a case where a swiftly dying man was getting evicted faster than he could die - it was complex brain fun, getting lots of praise from supervisors fun, figuring out a puzzle fun. Never actually spoken out loud was that there were two ways this could come out well for us , and the one most likely to happen was our client's death.
We laughed more than once working on that case. Hard.
I will admit that though I can do it with human tragedy, it's exponentially harder with violence against non-human animals. In this excellent piece you wrote, the part that got me was the dog in the ditch.
I don't carry the "vulture" grudge, but what chaps my ass are journalists who believe news serves as little more than a vehicle to personal fame. I find it more than unprofessional. They are on a par with crooked politicians, just public servants who don't care about the public or the service.