Okay, I’m going to try to keep this tight. I’m also going to try to keep any further rant-ish posts to a minimum, but…
We need to talk about journalism. I’ve spent enough years in school studying and practicing it to assign myself credit to spit out some ramblings on the subject. After all, there isn’t much else to do on this post-St. Patrick’s Day afternoon, writing to you from the heart of downtown Brantford, Ontario, Canada…
Hmm, that’s a good place to start.
I’m from St. Catharines, which isn’t much of a place in itself. A border town with 130,000ish people that’s cut in half by the QEW into North and South ends. There’s a mall, a university, and all sorts of things you’d expect from a small-to-mid-sized-town in Ontario. I lived there until I turned 18, graduated highschool and realised it was time to go.
Like every other Romeo out there I followed a girl to university. A mistake I’d quickly learn I made, sure, but there’s no use in getting bitter about it now. In fact I’d like to believe there’s at least one thing I can pull from this whole awful experience.
It’s that it was awful.
I know, that sounds strange.
But here’s the thing:
I’ve been doing a lot of writing about this twisted little town recently, a ton of fiction and a few journalism pieces. There’s one thing I’ve noticed about these stories – I have a hard time finding anything nice to say about this city.
“If you got nothin’ nice to say don’t say nothin’ at all.”
Well, pardon me, but fuck that.
If I wrote something like this:
Warmth and jubilance is everywhere. High school kids, abandoning class in exchange for the fresh spring air, ride bikes and skateboards through Harmony Square as the cheerful city workers dismantle the thawed skating rink. I listen to the soft jazz and whimsical laughter permeating the air between the occasional rushing of traffic on either end of this perfectly serene moment.
I would feel like a phony. Because that’s exactly what I would be.
Let’s try this one out instead:
On March 18, 2011, teenagers occupy Brantford’s Harmony Square on their skateboards and bicycles. City workers take apart the wooden frame of the melted skating rink. Pedestrains mingle here and there. In a bulldozer-type vehicle, one man scoops up slushy snow and piles it on the Colborne Street end of the rink, which in the spring and summer months becomes a fountain that sprays water 10 feet into the air to splash back down on its concrete base.
That looks something like what we’re taught professional journalism should be. The facts, stripped and barren, left for the reader to interpret. You might be thinking that the first piece was a higher calibre piece of writing.
You might be thinking you enjoyed reading it more.
Now I just want to take one more stab at painting you a picture:
You’re sitting in Coffee Culture, peering through the glass wall to watch the going ons in downtown Brantford. Everything turns gold, you see teenagers who have probably skipped school for the afternoon furiously riding their bikes in a mad circle around the shallow pond that used to be the Harmony Square skating rink. The runt in the pack struggles to keep up on his skateboard and a bobcat’s engine roars, switches gears and scoops up piles of slush and snow to dump at the other end of the square. The sun disappears into a sheath of heavy cloud. “Nothing gold can stay,” you remind yourself and your heart sinks when you watch a girl, maybe fourteen, on the other side of the glass, buy something in a small plastic bag off of a tall old man in a grey down vest.
Now you get the point. This last example is obviously slanted, and its loaded with my own personal bias. Not a bias I invented intentionally to create a certain feeling, like the first piece. And it’s certainly not censored and stripped of literary vitality like the second piece. Simply put, this is my natural bias coming through and leaving the reader to interpret that for him/herself.
There’s a feeling that I created (I hope) when you read the third piece. I’ve done certain things – slipped in parts of myself that make my writing really mine – and shifted into the second-person perspective, which among other classified trade-secret reasons, I used to increase the subjectivity of the reader’s experience. I picked up from Foucault that reading should be more of an experience than anything else, so I’ve worked to make reading the third piece not only informative, but experiential for you as the reader as well. And I didn’t censor a damn thing, including the drug deal my friends and I witnessed from our creaky leather chairs on the other side of the glass.
Am I getting a little abstract?
We need to understand that we all have a bias, one that’s damn near impossible to suppress, and as a writer the job is to be as transparent as possible about whatever lens it is that the bias is filtering reality through. Journalism needs to drop the act that it stands as some sort of bulletproof Superman of objectivity, balance and fairness. It just doesn’t exist. Hunter S. Thompson might’ve been a bit of a wild animal, but he was certainly aware of this. And he wasn’t the only one, but he is one of the greatest and clearest examples of a journalist being honest with his readers in terms of how he was filtering reality. Just read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
When you learn to love your bias, when you embrace it – and you’re honest with your slant and yourself – you’re writing will take on a far more powerful presence.
And you just might find that the crooked way you look at things can reveal a whole lot more about the truth than a balanced fact ever could.
THE WHISKEY DIARY 