What was the movie "Titanic" about? Was it about 1,000 people drowning after their boat sank, or was it about two love-struck kids who were torn apart by the tragedy?
The baker's dozen of The State Press columnists this semester, myself included, had the pleasure of talking with three veteran opinion journalists last week - Ed Montini and Richard Ruelas of The Arizona Republic, and Robert Nelson of The Phoenix New Times. The "Titanic" example illustrates one of the most critical pieces of advice they gave to us: If you want to get people's attention, don't write about numbers or facts. Write about individuals. Readers want to read stories about real people, with real emotions and real problems... even if, like Jack and Rose, they aren't strictly, um, real.
The guest columnists did not, of course, use "Titanic" as an example. I thought that up myself, because even if I thought that movie was eight kinds of suck, it did gross about a bajillion dollars.
However, Montini did use the example of John Hersey's excellent book, "Hiroshima," a nonfictional account of the lives of a half-dozen civilians who survived (to varying degrees) an atomic bomb falling on their titular city. Suffice it to say, "Hiroshima" is not the happiest book in the world, but as Montini suggested, everything you need to know about Hiroshima was in that book.
That was the statement that set off warning alarms in my brain.
Because it is not, in just about any sense of the word, true. "Hiroshima" is an undoubtedly good book; I read it twice (admittedly, for academic purposes both times). But at the end of the day, it is only about the lives of six people, and the fallout of atomic warfare. "Hiroshima" has little historical context: Hersey does not mention the war that the planet had been engulfed in for the better part of a decade prior to the deployment of the A-bomb, nor the fact that the same bomb decisively ended the war. Nor does he list how many Allied soldiers might have been lost in a full-scale invasion of Japan, an imperialist superpower at the time with a very different notion of the concept of "surrender."
It's true that people generally pay more attention to the micro than the macro, to how the "little picture" might put the "big picture" in better focus. But it's also true that the man who said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" was one Joseph Stalin. And even if he had a point about the nature of perception, I'd like to prove him wrong.
Sob stories might make you sob, but they don't make you think - and thinking people get things done. Is sobbing what journalism is all about, or is it better?
You may have noticed that the world of journalistic integrity has taken some nasty blows over the past year, most notably the copious fabrications by Jayson Blair at The New York Times. And he may only be the tip of the iceberg. People don't trust us anymore, and can you blame them?
This may well be an opportunity for journalism to rise above the scandal and return to the days of cold, hard facts. Montini, Ruelas and Nelson all stressed that we might even be correct if we write straight-up, abstract truth, but we probably won't get people to read us.
Well, if I wanted to pander to the lowest common denominator, I'd move to Hollywood. Maybe it's time for journalists to worry less about selling ourselves and more about informing the public; the latter is a reporter's true job, but the former is what went a long way toward Jayson Blair's deceptive reporting - and subsequent book contract.
Am I calling for an end to all personal stories in newspapers? No, of course not - anecdotes do have their place and their limits. Do I genuinely expect my voice to be heard, calling for a journalistic mini-revolution? I don't pretend to know.
But I do know that Vietnam can't be summed up in a single photograph, and the decision to use the atomic bomb cannot be found right or wrong merely on the basis of how it affected six people, or 60,000. If, in the future, my job comes to the day when a liberal columnist tries to exhort the virtues of socialized health care using a sob story of a little old American lady who can't afford her prescription drugs, I'll have to respond with a sob story of a little old Canadian lady who went effectively blind for eight months while waiting for the proper surgery because the government did not classify her as a priority. Then I will have to switch professions.
Because if journalism boils down to a game of "who's got a better sob story," then we won't even need Jayson Blair.
Eric Spratling is a journalism senior. Reach him at eric.spratling@asu.edu.
