Objectivity Lives, Alas

These are large thoughts for a reporter to have. Reporters live happily removed from themselves. They have eyes to see, ears to hear, and fingers for the note in their report. It was as if the drink he took in now moved him millimeter from one hat into another. He would be driven yet to participate or keep the shame in his liver--the last place to store such emotion! --Norman Mailer, 'Miami Beach and Chicago'

THESE THINGS happen to a reporter--the rage to participate in the events he is writing about and in the writing itself is sometimes hard to overcome. And when it is overcome, the aftertaste often is shame.

Reporters, for the most part, live very clean lives. Their job is to perceive but not to feel, to write but not to exist in the writing. It is only a severe trauma that makes them break the cast.

For me that trauma came a year ago this month when I went to Washington to cover the Pentagon March for this paper and another. My sympathy was with the demonstrators--that was well-established in my mind long before I went, and I felt no guilt about it. I was sure that I could still report the story accurately simply by making myself into a reporter--a quick metamorphosis from man to journalist, done every day. I had also established a rationale for covering the march but not marching--it was the role I could play best in this revolutionary movement.

But I was caught in the rush of events, pulled along by the strength of those people and what they were talking about, and finally moved to anger by what the soldiers were doing with their tear gas and clubs. At one point, I started screaming, nearly hysterical, at the soldiers to stop what they were doing. I wanted to rip off my press badge and join the demonstrators, but I didn't. I felt sick and useless, watching and not acting. I did not know why I could not act. It was probably fear. I thought, and then I realized that I was coming face-to-face for the first time with some of the same conflicts that my friends were feeling, conflicts I had been sheltered from by my role as reporter.

It seemed almost as a purging action that the next week I sat in against Dow in Mallinckrodt, making it clear to my editor (and myself) before I went in that I was no longer a journalist--that day.

FOR MOST OF the press the trauma of self-discovery that I felt at the Pentagon happened last summer in Chicago. Journalists got angry when they saw the cops beating kids (and beating other journalists). Some of them were moved to action, but nearly all must have felt the same uselessness at their inaction I did in Washington.

The most important thing reporters learned at Chicago was simply that they had these feelings, even in the line of duty. It was this realization that was the real trauma for them. They realized that their dispatches from Chicago were somehow tainted by their anger at the Chicago cops.

From there the possibilities were staggering. "If I feel anger," the reporter says, "perhaps I also feel other emotions when I am writing a story, perhaps I am actually involved in the stories I am writing, perhaps I am not objective!"

Objectivity has always been a strange idea. It demands the separation of the man from the event, even though the man is writing about the event from his own head with his own hands. Objectivity means that the reporter writes an event "the way it happened" not the way the reporter saw and smelled and felt it happen. But because the reporter is one man writing, not a machine spewing data, "the way it happened" not the way the reporter perceived it happening must be the same thing.

Journalism has invented conventions to protect this myth of objectivity. Things like pyramid style, the absence of modifiers, the elimination of the first-person are used to separate the reporter from the story he is writing in much the same way as he is separated by his role from the event itself.

CHICAGO should have been the coup de grace to the myth of objectivity, but unfortunately, instead of being liberated by their discovery, many journalists felt pushed in just the opposite direction.

Joseph Kraft wrote in his syndicated column the week after the convention: ... what about those of us in the press and other media? Are we merely neutral observers, seekers after truth in the public interest? Or do we, as the supporters of Mayor Richard Daley and his Chicago police have charged, have a prejudice of our own?

Kraft believes the press is out of touch with what he calls "Middle America," the mass of citizens who believed that Daley was right in ordering the demonstrators beaten. He concludes by questioning the privileges that the press has always assumed: ... those of us in the media would be wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint in pressing for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times as the agents of the sovereign public.

Kraft is willing to admit that he has feelings on violence, but he is so scared that they are out of touch with those of Middle America that he dare not show them on paper. To Kraft, the legitimacy of reporting has become a function of the opinions of Middle America. Showing your feelings is all right, he seems to say, so long as those feelings are consensus feelings too.

Kraft's reaction to the press's anger in Chicago is shame. As a journalist schooled in the myth of objectivity, he seems to feel guilty after showing his feelings. And justifies his action by turning to still another meaningless journalistic cliche--that the reporter is the "agent of the sovereign public."

Justifications like that are unnecessary. A journalist is a man writing about events. He does not have to develop medians of fairness; he only has to convince himself that what he is writing is true. That is a very hard thing to do, and that is enough.

NO JOURNALIST seems to be more at ease in justifying his writing than Norman Mailer. Mailer shows us the event by showing us how he reacts to the event. This style of personal reporting cannot be applied to all journalism, of course, but it is at least the direction that journalism should move now that objectivity has been exposed at Chicago.

There is an important prerequisite for any journalist who is showing us his feelings about an event--he must understand those feelings sufficiently to tell us where they come from and where they are going.

In the current (November) issue of Harper's Mailer deals with himself and with politics brilliantly in a 90 page piece on the conventions, Miami Beach and Chicago, which could serve as a model for journalists who are wondering where to go now that the protection of objectivity has been stripped away.

What Mailer feels most of all is fear, first simply fear of being arrested or beaten and not being able to write his story to meet Harper's deadline. Then another layer is peeled off: And then with another fear, conservative was this fear, he [Mailer] looked into his reluctance to lose even the America he had had, that insane war-mongering technology with its smog, its super-highways, its experts and its profound dishonesty ... he was tired of hearing of Negro rights and Black power--every Black riot was washing him loose with the rest, pushing him to that point where he would have to throw his vote in with revolution--what a tedious perspective of prisons and law courts and worse ... No, exile would be better. Yet he loathed the thought of living anywhere but America--he was too American by now: he did not wish to walk down foreign streets and think with imperfect nostalgia of dirty grease on groovy hamburgers, not when he didn't even eat them here.

Like the university and most other non-governmental institutions in this country, the press is undergoing the turmoil of self-analysis. The result can be the hopelessness of Kraft or the joy of Mailer. In the prying loose, something very fine may appear--but only if the journalist remembers that he is a man with feelings (all the time, even on duty), and that those feelings are some of the most important things he can write about.