COLUMN: Both Sides of the Story

From Abby Beshkin's "All Set," Fall'95 From Abby Beshkin's "All Set," Fall'95There were two news items a couple weeks ago that caught my eye. Neither of them got much media play, but for me they were monumental. The second was that reporters covering Rwanda have been asked to testify against alleged mass killers in the Rwandan civil war. This marks the first time since the Nuremberg trials of World War II criminals that Western journalists have been summoned to court for something they have covered. What these two events show is that journalists are being forced into realms of moral responsibility and judgement that far exceed the job of a news reporter, which is to answer the "Big Five" -- who, what, where, when and why. Only about two-thirds of American journalists agreed to testify about Rwanda. Many are queasy about it, claiming that it would question their impartiality as reporters. Newspaper writers, editors and publishers were equally as uncomfortable about printing the unabomber's letter. The vote was split almost down the middle; of the news publishers surveyed, about half said they would have published the letter, and the other half said they wouldn't. Some media analysts like Annenberg Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson advised the papers against printing the letter. But others, conceding that allowing the unabomber access to newspaper pages was poor journalism, still believed it was the papers' responsibility to print the letter hoping that printing it would spare a life. Questions like these are the double-edged sword of journalism. They are raised inevitably when a job meant to be done without bias must be done by people. And people are, by definition, passionate and biased. It's a dilemma I watch rise over and over. It frustrates me when I try to make sense of news from the Middle East. When I try to make sense of the news, I find other peoples' passions becoming confused with my own understanding of events. Over and over I watch otherwise credible journalists covering the Middle East for some of the most respected publications, lapse suddenly into loaded language, belying the opinions they have formed after months or years of covering their beat. I want only to have been at every event, to have covered it myself. Someday I want to be able to know to the detail exactly what happened, and to be able to form an opinion based on what's right. I'm a sucker for straight facts. It was a question I raised first when I used to report for The Daily Pennsylvanian. When high-rise security guards were caught sleeping on the job, and subsequently fired, the reporter part of me thought it was a great piece of news. The paper was perfectly justified in printing it, of course, because it was a hundred percent true. But the other side of me had watched too many people I knew find themselves suddenly unemployed, and I found it somehow unfair,that two guards caught sneaking a few extra minutes of sleep should lose their jobs to a couple wanna-be writers and photographers. But on the other hand, there has to be a bottom line. Readers are greedy to know what's going on in the world, but we've been spoiled by the accessibility of news, the ease with which we can receive information on the remotest corners of the world. There are plenty of writers who have sucked it up and made the choice (not to mention risked their lives -- death toll for journalists was about 150 last year, the highest ever) so that they could do their job right and let the rest of us know what was going on in the world. So asking writers to risk their neutrality is, essentially, asking them not to be reporters. But asking writers not to take a moral stance, is asking them not to be people. So this is the age-old journalism dilemma, the reason, in fact, that I was initially uneasy about being a columnist. Because giving an opinion immediately jeopardizes your facts in the eyes of the reader. And to me, there is a bottom line, and it lies in the facts. Reporters will testify about the tragedies they witnessed while they were covering Rwanda. The Washington Post took a moral stance and let what they saw as civic responsibility color their decision about printing the unabomber's letter. From an ethical standpoint, they may have saved a life. But journalistically speaking, it was a bad call. The two often don't go hand in hand.