through the looking glass CAN WE EVER REPORT FROM A NEUTRAL PERSPECTIVE? TENDAI MARSHALL NYAMAPFENE PLUMBS THE ULTIMATE PARADOX OF JOURNALISTIC AND NARRATIVE ENDEAVOUR.
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f you haven’t read Moby Dick, skip to the next paragraph because I’m about to spoil the ending. The ship is hit by a whale and sinks. The narrator, Ishmael, goes on to say “I alone escaped to tell the tale”: an incredible claim, given what he has just recounted. From this, the Australian philosopher David Stove coined the term ‘the Ishmael Effect’. This is the problem of how reliably we can participate in phenomena and then comment on them, and whether observation itself constitutes participation. This raises a question: how well can we recount the stories of others without telling ours too? When journalists claim to tell stories objectively, do they, like Ishmael, make an impossible claim, and “stand where there is nowhere to stand”? The sociologist Michael Schudson describes objectivity as a faith in facts, a distrust in values, and a commitment to their segregation. To be objective in that sense is to be nothing less than blind, mute, deaf and castrated. If this objection seems excessive, then at least it frames three particular problems. First, how does a disinterested observer articulate the proper response to some events? Sometimes the enormity of the event defies disinterested participation. Secondly, is the neat separation of facts and values that we entertain as a rational ideal, a valid one? Finally, how objective can we be
in choosing the stories we report? Journalists’ understanding of the enormity of an occurrence necessarily prejudices their selection of facts. A case in point would be the infamous Danish cartoons. A journalist could of course just “tell what happened”. But what was seen to happen may not be fully explanatory of what is actually going on. What was a passing curiosity to a disinterested atheist would have been gratuitous sacrilege to many Muslims. With no commensurable concept in this culture, such an aspect may be hard to convey adequately, and may indeed escape notice. Without such shared vocabulary, the observer can only tell the Other’s story within his own, however honest his intentions. Schudson’s confident segregation of fact and value reminds me of
NSTEIN’S WARNING THAT “YOU CANNOT WITTGE
SHIT HIGHER THAN
YOUR ARSE ”: an admonishment to those who suppose they can acquire a bird’s-eye view of a picture when they’re very much still inside it. The pursuit of truth and information in mass media is an inherently ideological pursuit, because it affects the awareness of choice, and exposes some issues to mass attention at the expense of others. Can we ever, or indeed should we,
neutralise the ideological signature in our media content? All stories have silent captions proclaiming “good thing!”, or “bad thing!” How convincingly can we really give terrorists, dictators and paedophiles a fair hearing? Do we want to? For information to be useful, it has to be organised. The categories into which we organise it are telling. As consumer media negotiates for space with socially challenging journalism, we risk falling into the complacency of categories, assuming that the news pieces on the front pages are intrinsically the big issues. Truth is what we bump into in the dark. It is worth remembering that when the journalistic agenda is set by a shopping list of generic made-to-order stories, we risk ceasing to look for truth in dark places. V
LASE BLASE, LEGALISE. THINK ABOUT YOUR ADDICTION, TIDE COMING IN, THE FEAR IT MIGHT ALL CATCH UP WITH YOU. T