An article from the New Republic last week discusses what the author calls “feelings journalism,” which is simply a new way of describing an old kind of writing: assuming we know what another person is thinking and feeling without actually asking.
I often see this in my students’ articles. Sometimes it’s an attempt at humor, much like The Guardian 50 Shades of Grey review criticized in the New Republic article. But instead of being funny, what happens when you project your own thoughts and feelings onto someone else is that you end up revealing your own biases and prejudices.
David Foster Wallace was the master at observational humor ( my favorite essay by him is “Shipping Out” on a ludicrous seven-night cruise) but he never pretended to know what someone was thinking; he always asked. And he managed to make us laugh with a voice that never claimed objectivity but also never belittled or stereotyped anyone. This kind of expert writing comes from the wisdom of knowing that we really know nothing.
Other times, my students are trying, and this is much encouraged, to be creative. But experimenting with creativity can easily cross the line into falsity, such as this absurd story about the Washington Post interviewing a cow (Please note this was 100 years ago. The Post, hopefully, doesn’t make up cow quotes anymore).
But most often, I see students commit “feelings journalism” out of a reluctance to talk to people and, for some reason, most often in photo captions. My students don’t like to interview the people they take photos of. Instead, they will use a zoom lens to capture images with as much distance as possible between camera and subject and then write that the person in the picture is sad or suffering or lonely or “always happy.”
It’s natural for us to feel emotional, and it’s natural to think everyone else feels the same. In class last week, we looked at Leslie Jamison’s thoughtful article about a whale called 52 Blue (full $3.99 Atavist version here; free excerpt in Slate here) that abnormally sings at a frequency too high for other whales to hear. The whale has been dubbed the loneliest whale in the world, and people are obsessed with him, writing him songs and giving him Twitter accounts, each projecting his or her own emotions onto a creature that has never actually been seen and that no one really knows does, or even can, feel loneliness.
Journalists have long argued over the concept of objectivity — whether it exists, how we can strive for it and whether we should. The general consensus is that real objectivity is a myth. Take journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who broke the Edward Snowden story, who wrote in a spirited exchange with New York Times journalist Bill Keller that “Human beings are not objectivity-driven machines. We all intrinsically perceive and process the world through subjective prisms. What is the value in pretending otherwise?”
So, if it is impossible for a journalist to be objective, then it must be the journalistic method that is, said Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in what they call a “discipline of verification,” a rigorous system for testing information. The two suggest ways to do this, including: seeking multiple witnesses, disclosing source information and asking all sides for comment. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics lists even more ways to seek truth and report it. And Walter Lippmann in 1920 wrote that journalists needed to be more like scientists, “who labor to see what the world really is.”
If we practice journalism without actually talking to people, we fall back on our own stereotypes, which takes us right back to the beginning to the idea of “feelings journalism.” In “Public Opinion,” Lippmann wrote, “If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal, but the minds though which they have filtered it.”
Which all goes to say: just ask.