Many people think that all journalism must be completely objective, that all journalists must keep their own personality, their own opinions out of anything they publish. I say this is not only ludicrous, it is all but impossible.
At the urging of my father, I just read a piece by the late Gonzo Journalist Hunter S. Thompson written in 1994 on the funeral of Richard Nixon. I think I had seen and read the piece before, but had a fairly strong reaction to it this time.
I have read some Thompson, most notably Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was a drug filled, paranoiac odyssey. He was a brilliant writer and a warped human being. As for Nixon, I remember clearly being horrified at the grand state funeral. In the article, Thompson described Nixon as a truly evil man and says history will remember him "... mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship."
I doubt that history will much remember him as Thompson describes him. He will probably be considered a flawed, perhaps even tragic - in the classical sense - hero, and has already been compared to some of the tragic heroes of the Greeks and Shakespeare. He died being thought of as the elder statesman who "Brought China to the table", after all. He will no more be thought of by history as an evil man as Johnson will be and I think there are parallels.
As my father suggested, it was a very well written piece. It was also filled with the personality of the writer, which many think of as simply bad journalism. Even though this is more of an editorial or opinion piece, most of his writing had the same thought process in evidence. It is part of why Thompson was called "Gonzo". I used to distrust journalism with a personal bias. I naively thought that the solemn duty of the journalist was to stay out of the written work, to just present the facts. Now I distrust any that doesn't have and admit to it. The bit I missed from "just present the facts" is "as he sees them."
We can't write without ourselves being in the piece, it is a physical impossibility, and it is imperative to acknowledge that. It is why any journalism that calls itself "fair and balanced" can't be. There is always a slant. The slant isn't necessarily a political one (even in today's hyper-political climate), but the thoughts, opinions and experience of the writer will always influence the statement of fact in a piece.
We are filtering beings, we humans, we learn of necessity to filter out so we can cope with the amount of input we get in our lives. We learn to do this early and on a very deep, absolutely subconscious level. Sometimes we are aware of the filtering, usually not. But as we grow, make decisions, form opinions, learn about our environment, both close in and widely ranging, these thing contribute to the filtering we do until there is nothing that we can think or even see that hasn't passed through that filter in some way. It can not be objective because, on a very deep level, we can not.
There is nothing wrong or scary about this. We just need to realize it so that, when we read what others have written or even what we ourselves write, we know that the facts laid out have been sifted through. Filtering, by definition, leaves things behind and when we know this, we can also know that no piece of writing, no statement of fact, no fiction or journalistic effort can be truly objective.
Once we know that, we can form our own opinions based on our own filters.
(You can find the original article by Mr. Thompson HERE.)
Geoff Hoff is a best selling author. Among his books is the one written with co-author Steve Mancini, a satirical novel called Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend. Mr. Hoff also teaches creative writing. Download your copy of his free book, Unleash Your Creative Writer.
Mr. Hoff and Mr. Mancini blog about the process of creativity at http://www.TipsOnWriting.net/blog/
0 comments:
Post a Comment