There is an old rock song whose major lyrical refrain advises the listener to love the one he or she is with. That’s good advice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Many of us, and
There is an old rock song whose major lyrical refrain advises the listener to love the one he or she is with.
That’s good advice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.
Many of us, and not just in our love relationships, are unable to enjoy the day we are living in.
Zen Buddhism bases most of its philosophy on the premise that human beings have great difficulty inhabiting the present moment.
Our minds race backwards when we’re sad or unhappy. The same little brains race forward when we’re hopeful or at least wanting something, anything new, badly enough.
Good reporters are no different. But their job forces them into the present.
Despite living and writing in the day to day, good reporters are usually not big community boosters. They are the questioners, the doubters.
The Patron Saint of Journalists should be St. Thomas, the famed Doubting Thomas, who refused to believe Jesus had returned from the grave until he was allowed to place his hands inside his Lord’s wounds. Today, old Doubting Tom would be a reporter.
Editors have to belong to a community. Publishers even more so.
Reporters actually do better if they can maintain their objectivity.
Loving a place is as dangerous as hating one.
Readers often accuse reporters of not caring, of not being a part of the community, which is the right neighborhood but the wrong street. And these same readers are often the ones who suffer the greatest disservice when a reporter does become too much of a home team supporter. Because a reporter who is too close to his sources and his beats will not always report the negatives about people or places he has come to love.
I lived in a tiny, isolated Idaho ski town in the Rockies for five years – 1988 through 1992. While I was there, the town suffered through its first murder in more than 40 years. A drug-crazed guy from the state’s capital city drove 150 miles to our little town for the express purpose of killing someone. He shot to death a 23-year-old graduate student who had played against my newspaper’s softball team earlier that night. I had tagged him out at second base. The crazy killer then fatally shot the town’s only homeless man. He knew neither of his innocent victims.
Our county only had 14,000 full-time residents, and after three years on the ground, I knew them all. I knew both victims, and I can still see their corpses as I write this 10 years later.
The local police caught him quickly because there was only one road out of our town, and so the county’s only murderer in four decades had nowhere to run.
He was tried, sentenced to 25 years to life twice, and is still in that state’s only maximum-security prison.
I covered the murders, his arrest and the trial. The police chief was a friend of mine and let me into the holding cell with the shooter only hours after he was arrested. This probably wasn’t legal, but it was a very small town. As you read these words, police are probably still driving drunk drivers home to make sure they get there safe.
I shared a cigarette with the killer, and we talked about nothing much, since he was extremely agitated. He didn’t seem dangerous, but by then he didn’t have his rifle, and I’d given him a smoke, too.
Certain readers of the newspaper in that mountain paradise, rich people by and large, had retired there at a young age. They loved that it was not California or Washington, where most of them had originated and made their retirement stakes.
Despite our attempts to write fairly and much less graphically than we might in a bigger city, we were attacked mercilessly, accused of sensationalism.
None of these critics ever entertained the thought that we might have moved to Sun Valley to get away from the same urban ills they had fled.
But a newspaper has to be a record for the entire community, whether in a small, homogenous mountain town, or on a beautiful South Pacific island.
We can’t pick and choose.
It’s our business to tell the reader, as factually as possible, what happened. And we have to do it as fast as we can, too.
Recently, there was another murder on Kaua`i. A horrible, brutal murder. The sixth of the year.
That is news. And there is no way to sugarcoat it.
We don’t support murder. And especially as we get older, we may not even enjoy reporting on it all that much. But we have to.
No place is exempt from human irrationality. And as long as newspapers are free, and not simply organs of the local business community or chamber of commerce, reporters will cover crime as well as covering government, business, tourist-related functions and features about lovely people doing lovely things.
That’s our job.
TGI staff writer Dennis Wilken can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) and dwilken@pulitzer.net
