Close but not involved

Having devoted my career to journalism, I perked up whenever E.L. Doctorow, or his narrator McIlvaine, reflected on newspapers, reporters or writing in general in the novel The Waterworks. Here are some of those reflections, as well as some of my own.

Professionally you try to get as close to things as possible, but never to the point of involvement.

Close but not involved. That’s a fine line for a journalist, but an important one. Obviously that reporter who made news herself recently by sleeping with her sources crossed that line.

We did not feel it necessary to assume an objective tone in our reporting then. We were more honest and straightforward and did not make such a sanctimonious thing if objectivity, which is finally a way of constructing an opinion for the reader without letting him know that you are.

The narrator is writing about newspapers of the 1870s from the perspective of old age, sometime in the 20th century. In the 19th century objectivity was not the journalistic ideal it later became. It seems to me that, especially in the Trump era, newspapers have been returning to the avoidance of objectivity that McIlvaine idealizes. No longer are editorial opinions confined to editorial pages. Front-page headlines often suggest positive or negative inferences to be made from the news, and there seems to be more partisan selectivity in which stories are told and which are ignored. At my newspaper, especially during the 1970s and 1980s when I was the editorial page editor, we even tried to keep the editorial page somewhat objective by endorsing a mix of both Republicans and Democrats and maintaining a balance of liberal and conservative syndicated columnists.

He was appreciative! God forgive me — I could only think this spells ruin for him as a writer.

Elsewhere McIlvaine writes that a journalist never apologizes for a story. It’s the same idea, and close to the idea above of remaining uninvolved while staying close. A reporter doesn’t want to owe anything to a news source, and both appreciation and apologies imply debt. And debts must be repaid.

Did that mean I found myself prepared to put the interests of the story ahead of the lives of the people involved in it?

Doctorow’s story ultimately challenges the narrator’s fine journalism principles. To print his story will adversely affect the lives of people he has come to care about. I have been in that situation as a journalist, if not quite as dramatically. Most reporters have. One’s ideals as a journalist can sometimes conflict with one’s ideals as a human being.