Reporting from a Safe Distance

A little more than ten years ago, Gregory Lynch, Sr. choked back tears at his home in small-town West Virginia, “as he stood on his porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures.” Lots of people were doing those kinds of things in the pages of the New York Times, that year, as a reporter provided detailed descriptions of the wrenching conversations he had with the families of soldiers at war. Lynch had been thinking about his daughter, Jessica, who was captured by Iraqi troops and rescued by Special Forces soldiers; a mother in small-town Texas had been anguished over the fate of her son, a soldier who was missing in Iraq.

But Jayson Blair had made it up. He hadn’t traveled to the places those people lived; instead, he borrowed from other reports, and invented colorful details out of thin air. Gregory Lynch, the Times would later acknowledge, couldn’t see cattle pastures and tobacco fields from his porch, because they weren’t there.

You can’t casually fill in the details of a life that you see in front of you, because the danger in the invention is apparent: there’s no tobacco out there. The great danger of a comfortable job in journalism is that “out there” can become abstracted, a disembodied narrative concept in a place you don’t have to worry about seeing. West Virginia, West Virginia . . . Uh, what, tobacco? (Starts typing.)

But as Tina Brown once helpfully explained to young up-and-comers, “Nothing is better for a young journalist than to write about something that other people don’t know about. If you can afford to send yourself to some foreign part, I think that’s by far the best way to break in.”

The point of the foreign part isn’t the foreign part, but what it does for you. Whether that foreign narrative object is in coastal Spain or the middle of Texas, its function is to distinguish you for going there and narratively constructing it. For Macarena Hernández, a reporter at the San Antonio Express, Juanita Anguiano was a woman, physically present in a particular place, whose actual son had gone missing at war. For Jayson Blair, it was a bitchin’ story, and easy enough to bullshit.

Since this article was published two days ago, there’s been a lot of negative comment on Twitter and below the line. Lisa Adams herself was upset by it. I had been in communication with her a number of times in recent weeks; given her health, I could have given her advance warning about the article and should have told her that I planned to quote from our conversations. I regret not doing so.

To be clear, those conversations were private Twitter exchanges. Emma Keller privately contacted a woman with a terminal illness, didn’t mention that she was going to quote from their personal discussion, and then used it to shit all over a cancer patient in print.

Then Bill Keller joined the fun in a New York Times op-ed piece, with an added piece of casual nastiness:

What Britain and other countries know, and my country is learning, is that every cancer need not be Verdun, a war of attrition waged regardless of the cost or the casualties. It seemed to me, and still does, that there is something enviable about going gently. One intriguing lung cancer study even suggests that patients given early palliative care instead of the most aggressive chemotherapy not only have a better quality of life, they actually live a bit longer.

Lisa Adams was 37 years old when she was diagnosed with cancer, and a mother of three young children. And she’s totally dying wrong—just ask Bill Keller. She should go gently, already.

This response is probably the most appropriate, but still: how does one become this inured to the humanity of a human subject?

For so many journalists, years of practice gazing out at distant narrative objects in wholly abstracted foreign parts, even the ones right there in Manhattan with you.