It’s more difficult to get publications to focus on issues that are more critical. It’s never been easy, and I think in the last few years it’s gotten more difficult as society becomes more obseesed with entertainment, celebrity and fashion. Advertisers are tired of having their products displayed next to images of human tragedy; they feel that it somehow detracts from the saleability of their products.
– James Nachtway, photojournalist
Alert: This post is essentially a revised, mercifully shorter (though obviously not short enough) version of something I started writing some time ago. I’m basically using it as something to code up as I learn my way around Blogger’s code. Still, this early in the blog, I plagiarize myself. Oh, the tragedy of it! The photos were taken with various Lomo cameras, the best darn pic snappers there ever were.
June, 2003: Desert heat of the fahrenheit 95+ variety weighed heavily while a late-morning sun’s glare bounced off dirty, chalk-colored cement barriers at the Huwara checkpoint just beyond the southern outskirts of the sprawling, battered West Bank City of Nablus, where people come to wait. Wait to get into town. Wait to get out. Wait to be turned back. Men in loose slacks and thin, buttoned-up shirts peddled tang-flavored orange drinks and warm, flat cola from umbrella-covered carts. Children took turns peddling a dinged-up chrome Huffy around the empty road, not far from Their parents, who were crowded in a thick herd that passed for a line that crushed into a coral of neon-bright traffic barriers, chain fence and cement blocks under the shadow of a thin metal roof propped on skinny, rust-hued legs. A row of dusty, late-80s yellow Mercedes taxis lined the street on the out-of-town side of the checkpoint. Bored drivers leaned against their cabs, chatting, smoking, waiting to see who made it to the other side and needed of a lift.
Three young men were pulled out of the crowd. They weren’t standing together. The soldier had been shuffling down the line, talking to some people in even tones, pointing to others and barking orders. He took identification papers as he moved along Sometimes he’d glance at the contents of the papers he’d been given. At other times, he’d just thumb through them while staring at their owner’s face. He usually, returned the documents and told the recipient, in memorized, blunt Arabic phrases, to go to the back of the line, to the front of the line, or to turn around and go home. But sometimes the IDs would go into his back pocket. Three times at least that day, as these young men were culled from everyone else, directed through the narrow opening between the barriers, and ordered to stand facing a fence, their backs to everyone else in line while the ID inspections continued. Those who offered a word of protest received precursory stare-downs and were quickly went silent. The idle chatter and shuffling ebbed into an uneasy quiet as everyone else watched as the young men were blindfolded and had their hands bound behind their backs with plastic straps.
We all watched as they were marched in the narrow, uncertain steps that sightless people make, down a dusty path on the other side of a metal, razor-wire-topped fence. Three twenty-somethings. Maybe teens. About the same age as the fellow in the disheveled fatigues wielding an M-16, skulking just behind them. They all, the four of them, strolled slowly toward a cluster of green-gray, metal roofed concrete buildings. Those three were trying to get into the city I was waiting to leave. A taxi showed up. I was allowed to leave. Strongly encouraged to leave. I got in the taxi and did just that.
That’s the short version. That scene explained life in the West Bank as much as anything else I’d witnessed during my too-short, two-week stay in Palestine and Israel back in ‘03. Maybe it was part of a larger story. Something that would show up on the wire services. Alleged members of this or that group arrested. I tried to imagine what it was going to be like in one of those windowless concrete buildings. To be an alleged member of this or that group, and arrested.
At the time, I had been toiling four years as a copy editor of national and international wire service stories for a daily Gannett newspaper tucked away in the Northwest corner of these United States, about as far from situations such as the one just described as you could get. I’m not used to the random extremes of Mideast life presented without a strong dose of attempted explanation. The closest I have come to experiencing this place has been through regular dispatches of distilled text courtesy of various news services feeding into a Dell computer and dumped into Microsoft Word documents in 10-point PoynterGothic-regular type, cascading downward in 10.5-pica columns. I have mostly witnessed the events of Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem or Tel Aviv through dramatic but cropped still images that flash across the screen on their way to Quark documents as I decide whether they should tell the story as a horizontal or vertical photograph. My sole involvement with the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been limited to matters of Associated Press style, spelling and the proper use of the semicolon.
After a while, reading daily dispatches detailing the carnage and strife weaving through life in the Occupied Territories has a numbing effect that reduces those people who inhabit your typical Newsday or Washington Post offering to cardboard cutout characters. Less than real. Part of your mind chips away at the possibility that what you’re reading about is actually going on to the extent that the news coverage says it is, because if it was, surely someone somewhere would be doing something about it, and you’d be reading that story instead.
I decided to witness things for myself. I made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to see where wire stories are born. I sought to connect with what I had — from a great distance — been exposing to myself and anyone else who picks up the paper for something other than Seattle Mariner scores and matinee times. I wanted to compare actual experience with the second-hand accounts that crouch inside the international sections of so many daily rags, waiting to accost readers each morning with morbid descriptions of hellfire missile attacks, suicide bombings and photos of wailing people, sometimes in hajibs, other times in yarmulkes. I wanted to compare the reality of what I saw with what I’d been reading. Step into the story for a bit and make the real a little more realistic. Again, more on that later. Right now, we really need to talk about the fake and why, at times, it can seem so much more compelling than reality.
Weird pastimes of the insomnia set: So there’s this thing I work on every once in a while. It’s a concept, I guess, or the early rumblings of a thesis, or maybe just another damned blog. Right now, it’s not much of anything. Not a product anyway, Nothing tangiable that could be picked up or perused. It’s just a notion. When I work on it, it’s called “Graphic Content.” Maybe that’s the title of it, I’m not sure. But it gets about as close as anything gets as to explaining why I went to the Middle East back in 2003, and why I’m now doing activist media work in Palestine. I’ll explain why it’s called “Graphic Content” in just a bit.
Most blogs kept by folks running off to do this sort of thing tend to be personal, firsthand, visceral accounts of life in order to try and sell thier site’s visitors on the horrors being visited upon the people they’ve gone to support. No doubt, this one eventually will have much along those lines in a short while. But the regular visitor to this site will occasionally have to suffer though scrolling down passed this kind of stuff as well.
Essentially, Graphic Content (more later on why it’s called that) is an examination of my three interests, which border on a vicelike obsession, and why I think they could be at all related: media, activism and literature. The last, not exactly relegated to deep examinations of the work of Virginia Woolf, but rather narratives that, in different ways, have always been repeated down through the ages. When considering media, I’m thining of the various ways we relate current events to one another. With activism, I’m interested in the direct involevment people have in an issue or situation. And with literature, it’s the artful use of language for story telling rather than specifically the study of the classics.
REAL & MORE REAL: Fiction writers (for page and screen) aim to achieve something called “suspension of disbelief.” It’s how they get you to care about the characters they’ve just fabricated. They employ (hopefully) considerable language skills to set a mood and create a sense of urgency: What you are reading demands your full attention. It is vital to your understanding of things. Now that you’ve started, if you do not finish this book, you will feel less complete as a person. If the author uses her talents well, the audience is hypnotized into finding it at least important (and possibly necessary) to follow the exploits of fake people in situations that never took place.
It works.
We read novels with devotion, staying up until the early morning hours to find out what happens, crying when deaths and heartbreak occur, cheering when obstacles are overcome. Suspension of disbelief gives the reader a mental release. It raises the gate and allows the mind to run through, into a wide arena where new ideas can be taken for test drives and where we can pal around with a sundry of dubious personalities we might otherwise avoid through the course of our daily lives.
Across the land, people carry out diluted performances of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We passionately bond with pretend people as we lay in our beds each evening with our backs propped up by piles of pillows next to table lamps. A few hours of slumber and rapid eye movement later, we regain consciousness with a vastly different eye for the printed word. With our sense of disbelief no longer suspended (or with our sense of belief shoved in a box), we cast a fleeting gaze across daily newspaper headlines as we skim the pages during the amount of time it takes to consume a bagel and coffee before slogging off to work. All-to-true accounts of paramilitary massacres in Colombian villages, children born without eyelids due to depleted uranium from the first war against Iraq, Hutus killing Tutsis, voters kept from voting, unarmed civilians shot at by police, homeless people found frozen to death in dumpsters, and endangered species demoted to extinct are met with a subconscious suspension of belief. On one level, you know it happened. It’s there. Officials have discussed the matter. There is a picture, or perhaps a multi-colored chart. It is real.
And yet it’s unreal. It isn’t applicable. What can I do about it? It must be a freak incident. There has to be another side. They aren’t telling the whole story. That just couldn’t happen the way they said it did. Who shoots villagers? What’s a “paramilitary?” Is it like the military? If the uranium is “depleted” how can it hurt anything? What’s a Hutu? Weren’t all those people kept from voting criminals anyway? Why are people in dumpsters? I have a job, where’s their job? There are services for those kind of people, you know. They went extinct? Like the dinosaurs? What’s anyone doing about any of this?
We connect less with newspapers, forget more of what we read in them, and find less of the nonfiction that they offer to be as applicable to our lives when compared with the goings on characters in our favorite works of make-believe. Is it because these tales take place far from our homes and effect people well beyond the outer rings of our own personal Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon galaxies? More newspaper publishing companies are funding research that seems to point to this, at no little cost. But aside from hatching new ways to craft colorful graphics on how to shed pounds after the holidays and trend stories on the shopping patterns of the market-created halflings known as “tweens,” all this research and analysis has done zip to reverse a decade of declining circulation figures. These surveys and studies tackle numerous questions as to why people switch on TVs or launch web browsers as opposed to turning to page B6. They tell about people who aren’t reading and try to come up with ruses to make newspapers mime other mediums. They have yet to seriously tackle the murky, more abstract conundrum: Of people who read, what are they choosing to read and why are they choosing it?
Consider Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth. it was popular. A lot of people chose to read it, anyway. More than a few journalists would grumble that comparing Smith’s award-winning literary achievement to daily 800-word updates from the AP’s Jerusalem bureau is more than a tidge unfair, and they would have a point. What causes people to mentally connect with others (real or imagined) could be and probably has been debated for years by academics around the globe in the colleges of humanities and social science. It’s easy to conclude that novels, with their entire, well-parsed narratives comfortably encased between hard-bound or paperback covers, have the distinct advantage. They would be right. it’s not fair. So much in life isn’t.
Smith gracefully dodges between humor and poignancy, delves into race relations, cultural and religious differences, generation gaps, how people both do and do not relate to one another, and fighting the Nazis. Journalists have tackled all these subjects with varying degrees of success. There has been prize-winning coverage tackling race relations, religion, generation gaps, Nazis and their kids, the neo-Nazis. Sometimes people even pay attention. On a few occasions, awards are issued during fancy banquets. However, it would be a lot more difficult, given the deadlines and the amount of space typical newspaper stories are allotted, to delve into the lives of people and their behaviors with regards to racial divides between groups of separate generations who originate from opposite ends of the earth and hold little in common belief with one another with regards to the afterlife and how an individual goes about attaining a decent one…. And still find a little time to kick some Nazi ass, or at least talk about it.
But wait, there’s more. To approach literary journalism, a writer must not just raise prickly issues that editors are certain no one wants to read about and cite statistics about people who watch “Survivor” as compared to Ken Burns documentaries on PBS to make their point. She has to infuse her work with drama and that mysterious element of “human interest.” For that, she has to inhabit her work with people worth following. People a reader can bond with.
For journalists, this is the “grunt work.” It involves leaving your chair. It costs money. It uses resources. It is time consuming. The people our scribe will find on her beat are prone to do whatever the hell they want regardless of what she thought she was going to write about. It’s up to her to make sense of it all and find some point worth making. Then, she must be a talented enough writer to translate everything she has witnessed and recorded into something worth following the jump to A6. She must tell the story, and in telling it, show why it’s worth the reader’s time.
Now, get rid of all that running around (except for perhaps a couple investigative field trips for the sake of “authenticity,” which really does deserve to be both italicized and surrounded by quotation marks). Add a strong imagination and a mind for detail. Throw in a good dose of life experience, an ear for natural conversation and a sprig of inspiration. Eureka! We have our fiction writer diligently penning his next Oprah Book Club Pick of the Week, and we’re back to writing akin to White Teeth.
Smith’s novel is full. Detailed. Olfactory. From the smell of old people’s apartments and the mating rituals of orchestra teachers, an idea is conveyed that all this stuff might have happened. Is being recalled rather than imagined. In addition to that, it contains the entire lives of her hapless pair of protagonists as well as their mates and offspring. There’s a back story for everything going on and it’s all in one handy carrying case called a book. Nothing needs to be rehashed. Novelists don’t have to remind readers of what happened before. They don’t have to worry about readers who have just jumped in without knowing what took place in chapters one through six.
Novels are tidy. There’s nothing outside the author’s control. Characters do as they’re told, look however their maker wishes them to look and say exactly the right thing at the right time for the narrative. They are faced with circumstances designed just for them and they deal with these situations with actions taken solely to maximize whatever point the writer feels like making. When a novel reaches its conclusion — and is concluded well — and the reader finishes his half of the bargain and closes the book for the final time, he will feel like he’s been through something. Learned something about the human condition or has been apart of someone else’s life. That a work of fiction can eventually be closed and put down —finished — is intrinsic to its neatness.
The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch was reminded of the cleanliness of fiction while sitting on a friend’s porch in Kigili, Rwanda, reading McTeague by Frank Norris. In the final pages of his book on Rwanda’s mid-nineties genocide, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Gourevitch recounts how he tried to describe Norris’ century-old narrative involving the misadventures of an everyman-type, dull San Francisco dentist to his Rwandan friend who had just recently witnessed his government call on all Hutus to rise up and slaughter their Tutsi neighbors after Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down in April of 1994. The command resulted in the deaths of more than 800,000 people.
McTeague ends on a bit of a downer, possibly its only similarity to the mass-murder spree in Rwanda. Two former chums end up despising one another and fight to the death in the desert. One eventually wins, but through the course of battle the victor becomes handcuffed to his enemy and finds himself without a key and shackled to a corpse:
McTeague did not know how he killed his enemy, but all at once Marcus grew still beneath his blows. Then there was the sudden last return of energy. McTeague’s right wrist was caught, something licked upon it, then the struggling body fell limp and motionless with a long breath.
As McTeague rose to his feet, he felt a pull at his right wrist; something held fast. Looking down, he saw Marcus was dead now; McTeague was locked to the body. All around him, vast interminable, stretched the measureless leagues of Death Valley.
“McTeague remained stupidly looking around him, now at the distant horizon, now at the ground, now at the half-dead canary chittering feebly in its little gilt prison.
“I told him the story I had just read, that ultimate image: one man dead, the other locked to the body — in the desert,” Gourevitch writes. After some discussion and speculation on the various ways one might get out of handcuffs without a key and whether the literature parallels the situation at hand in Rwanda, Gourevitch’s friend concludes that “novels are nice. … They say, ‘The End.’ Very nice. A marvelous invention. Here we have stories, but never ‘The End.’ ”
The way news dispatches from around the globe are presented, it seems as though many in the press tend to operate under this notion as well. Coverage seems to fade out minus any solid conclusions. The tribunals on the genocide in Rwanda have been covered only slightly more than the frenzy stirred up by the government to make such a horror possible in the first place. That is to say, it wasn’t covered at all. To most people around the globe, a nationwide murdering binge just snapped into existence out of pure nothingness and then popped like a balloon and was done. The dead — those people who make up the 8 followed by three 0s, a comma and three more 0s — remain an abstraction that much of the world is fast forgetting.
Nearly a million people got sudden, brutal “The Ends” in Rwanda. Gourevitch, and scant others, attempted to tell a smattering of their stories in ways to make readers notice. His goal was in common with the basic desire of fiction writers. It is a call to care for these people he is telling you about, and to think about why what happened to them happened. To do so, he recounts some harrowing episodes involving individuals amid the greater unending story. It’s a little devise called “context.”
Consider why Gouravitch packed his bags and caught a flight to Rwanda:
The piled-up dead of political violence are a generic staple of our information diet these days, and according to the generic report all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, killers monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent. Except for the names and the landscape, it reads like the same story from anywhere in the world: a tribe in power slaughters a disempowered tribe, another cycle in those ancient hatreds, the more things change the more they stay the same. As in accounts of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, we are told that experts knew the fault lines were there, the pressure was building, and we are urged to be excited — by fear, distress, compassion, outrage, even simple morbid fascination — and perhaps to send a handout for the survivors. The generic massacre story speaks of ‘endemic’ or ‘epidemic’ violence and of places where people kill ‘each other,’ and the ubiquity of the blight seems to cancel out any appeal to think about the single instance. These stories flash up from the void and, just as abruptly, return there. The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd.
That explains the problem journalists face. His next sentence contains the solution: “I wanted to know more.” Those five words illustrate the bond writers and readers share. It’s why anyone chooses to pick up a pen, or something penned. Something was missing. There was something more out there. We want to know more. We want to know why.
Context. This is one aspect where comparisons between novels and newspaper coverage are telling. We can look at them from the perspective of artistic mechanics. Typical news dispatches can often lack the sense realism, urgency, broad perspective found in most literary works. They come off as freakish, random events devoid of context. Readers are frequently left with the choice of vexing over unanswered questions or simply making blind assumptions as to why something took place or someone did something. Novels, meanwhile, make more sense because they usually read the same way humans conduct their lives. Characters act and react based on what has previously transpired in the narrative. Plot lines are driven by causation. Protagonists work off of motivations spawned by experiences, the same as readers (AKA: humans).
CONSIDER BOB: Bob is that buckle-down, no-nonsense guy driving the sleek sedan with leather interior in those Devry University School of Business advertisements that used to come on television in the middle of late-night M*A*S*H reruns and between afternoon segments of “Who’s Your Daddy” DNA tests on the Maury Povich Show.
Here’s what those ads don’t tell you about Bob: He wakes up at 7:47 a.m. Monday through Friday because he’s figured out over the last few years that he can sleep until that exact minute, keep up basic hygiene requirements, eat breakfast and still make it to work on time. This morning, Bob peruses the local newspaper’s entertainment section because he heard a community college’s drama department is going to be performing a musical adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” Bob is hoping to ask Mabel from accounting on a date and happens to know that she enjoys musicals but that her most recent ex, Harold, didn’t fancy the performing arts. Bob is trying to prove he’s no frumpy Harold. Aside from that, Bob checks the lottery numbers. If he should win, he’ll not go to work ever again or consider Mabel as a suitable dating companion. He will use his new financial resources to pursue Carmen Electra. Once that’s out of the way, Bob reads his horoscope and uses the information he finds there in his decision to forgo taking the highway to work and will instead drive through town.
Bob’s life is filled with causation. Situations are presented and he deals with them to the best of his abilities. Bob lives context.
While finishing his corn flakes, Bob quickly scans the rest of the paper because he feels a vague obligation to stay somewhat up to date on current events. That’s when, on page A7, he comes across a small story headlined “suicide bomber kills 7, injures many others.” While reading the first sentence in the story, he wonders how there can be so many suicide bombers. Then, for two paragraphs, he feels bad about the commuters on the exploded bus. He’s done with breakfast by the middle of the second sentence of the fourth paragraph and thoughts of the commuters fade quickly as he heads out to warm up his car.
Now he’s thinking about how glad he is not to be riding the city bus anymore. He chuckles as he recalls the strange guy who 
always sat in the back seat of the #47, reeked of stale beer and Old Spice and who sang show tunes very loud and off key. That reminds him of the musical and of Mabel, and as he pulls out of the driveway, it is with a mix of anticipation and then, suddenly, dread of rejection. This causes him to vomit his corn flakes. Bob will have to change clothes. He will be late to work and wonders if he’ll get in trouble. He will consider calling in sick but decide against it due to a Power Point presentation he’s supposed to make before the board of directors at 1:30. Shaken and feeling queazy and less confident, Bob will avoid the entire accounting department all day, and aside from meekly performing his presentation on the usefulness of pie graphs in inter-departmental budget memos, Bob will sit in the comfortable environs of his cubical and surf the web as he pretends to work on quarterly reports. While looking at MSNBC coverage of Madonna making out with Britney Spears, Bob will notice a small sentence fragment off to the side linking to a story located elsewhere on the website. It reads: “Israel retaliates after bus bomb; 29 killed in Gaza raid.” Bob will not click the link, but he will mutter “good for them,” as he Googles “Madonna+Carmen+Elektra+tongue” on a hunch.
This brings us back to White Teeth. Bob once borrowed it from Mabel to illustrate that they shared common interests, and to his surprise, he actually enjoyed the book. The main characters, Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones, were ordinary blokes, kind of funny and easy to identify with. Bob had never been in a war, but he could sympathize with these characters who were in a war. They were reacting in a believable manner to the extreme situations placed in front of them. Bob has never considered suicide, but when Archie attempts it, he is moved because he has gone through bouts of hopelessness, much like that character. Bob has no wife or children, is not Muslim and has always been wary of Islam though he readily admits to knowing not much about the belief. But he likes Samad and actually has the most empathy for that character, especially as Samad struggles with overwhelming guilt as he attempts to balance his religious beliefs with his extra-marital affair and proclivity for masturbation. Bob, raised deep in America’s Bible Belt, knows guilt.
When another character, a teenage boy, attempts to join a radical animal rights organization in attempts to woo a girl, Bob is right there, considering that he borrowed the book for a similar purpose. The group plots to kidnap the boy’s father who, as it turns out, is involved in animal research. Bob has never tried to kidnap anyone and his only forays into animal research have involved experimentation with different brands of steak sauce. But the character struggled though the circumstances in a way that a pimply teenage boy might if he was trying to balance his love/hate relationship with his dad against the overwhelming need to shag every 15 minutes.
Bob can sympathize with the fictional characters. He can empathize with the Israeli bus riders to a degree, given his limited exposure to mass transit. He is empathetic because:
A) He once rode a bus.
B) He would prefer not to be blown up.
Today’s news offering, and many similar, provide no entry point for Bob to understand what a Palestinian is or where one comes from. Most of what Bob has read about them is in the context of suicide bombers or members of groups with names he doesn’t remember who wear black masks and carry Russian-looking guns. He reads that they send suicide bombers to attack Israeli citizens and that the Israeli military “responds” to these attacks by blowing up places in a land that is not even officially identified as a nation. The military is protecting its nation, which sounds familiar to Bob. The people they are fighting seem more distant. These other people are called Palestinians and they are from where?
There is no such thing as a dateline called “Palestine,” unless maybe you’re writing news from Palestine, North Carolina.
Bob also finds it easier to relate to the Israeli military’s need to retaliate after suicide attacks. Typical stories about Israeli Defense Force operations are usually prefaced with information about how soon they take place in relation to the last salvo from Palestinian militants. He’s read other stories similar to today’s snippet: There will be an attack in Jerusalem, or Tel Aviv or some settlement and then the military will “respond.”
The opposite case rarely happens. Seldom are strikes by Hamas or the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade referred to as a response to anything. Israel becomes this character, in the context of a narrative, thrust into a situation with certain notions that inform its reactions. The armed Palestinian groups are seen as entities who are acting in a vacuum, with no attributable cause outside some nebulous hatred steeped in a history few people have been very consistent about. They are seen as more incomprehensible because they are shown as acting, more often than not, without motive or context. They just seem to explode. This makes no sense to Bob and doesn’t jive with what he learned from his (as the ad touts) “real world” education.
Acting without cause makes no sense, especially when you consider the drastic nature of the subject at hand. In literary terms, the Palestinian militants of many news articles make for flimsy characters. The way they are typically portrayed is more akin to the apolitical Ian Flemming creations designed to be bested by James Bond. Most Israeli-Palestinian blow-by-blow coverage is formulaic below a par with checkout counter impulse-buy genre pulp. And from a news standpoint, avoiding cause is to avoid being truthful, not to be confused with being accurate. While each article contains several details — and most of these details are probably accurate in and of themselves — to be truthful is to accept that each attack, no matter the side, is in “response” to something. That’s the nature of conflict. Avoiding this reality will cost readers, who tend to not read things they don’t have any way of understanding in favor of offerings they can understand. That should be the worst-case scenario for any journalist or newspaper; that their work might go misunderstood and/or unread.
SAMAD & ARCHIE Vs. 200 PALESTINIANS
It could just be daily reporting’s lot to be more urgent and yet be less read, understood or remembered. But it seems, considering the deep well of content journalistic writing has to draw from, that it should not be resigned to this fate without a fight. This brings us back to White Teeth…
REAL LIFE: On April 2, 2002, about 30 Palestinian gunmen and nearly 170 Palestinian police and civilians scurried into a Franciscan monastery in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. They were fleeing Israeli tanks during one of the military’s raids on the town. A dramatic standoff ensues, lasting into early May, speckled with violence, desperate acts, International intrigue and religious/philosophical overtones.
ZADIE SMITH’S WHITE TEETH: On the night of May 6, 1945, British soldiers Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal escaped death and took refuge in an abandoned church in a rural German village where they rode out the final days of Europe’s portion of World War II.
LIFE: A Palestinian bell-ringer, an employee of the church, is killed by an Israeli sniper.
ZADIE: Archie makes friends with village kids by sharing bubble gum in the hopes that they will prove useful allies during his and Samad’s stay.
LIFE: A fire erupts in on of the church’s dormitories when the military launches a flare into the building.
ZADIE: Bored, Samad finds opium in a medicine cabinet and spends his days rubbing it on his gums and up into his eyelids.
LIFE: Foreign peace activists manage to sneak passed Israeli troops and start issuing press releases from inside the church, saying the people there have been living on grass and leaves for food. Famished and tired, the last remaining Palestinian holdouts surrender to soldiers and are taken into custody, 13 of them were on Israel’s most wanted list. The story fades away, ending without end. Who these people are and what came of them go unrecorded.
ZADIE: Archie and Samad are found by a contingent of Russian soldiers and the two make up grandiose tales to cover the fact that they sat out the war. The chapter continues, including one last attempt at bravery that ends in failure. And then there’s the rest of the book. They grow old, listen to music, date, develop, change likes and dislikes, marry, have affairs, have fights, laugh, attempt suicide, have children, protest annual Harvest Festivals at school board meetings, deal with the fallout of their actions, exchange witty banter on occasion.
REAL LIFE: Who the hell knows? As soon as the siege was over and several Palestinians arrested and the rest had gone home, no media outlets have paid attention to why it had happened in the first place or what has happened since.
Archie and Samad, two figments of prose, are more realistic, more developed, and garner more sympathy than the creatures of flesh and blood who inhabited the news stories of that Franciscan monastery siege. Why should that be?
Forget the rest of White Teeth for a moment and let’s just focus on the parallel tales of folks ducking into churches in search of refuge. The quick gripe would be that Zadie has the clear advantage. She goes where her characters go. There is no place they can hide where she cannot follow. Writers on the siege beat might argue that they’ve got no way to access the goings on of the group holed up in the monastery. And while authors have less life-and-limb risk assessment to consider when trailing their characters through the rougher neighborhoods of novels, we can’t overlook one group of very real people who were able to get as close to the story as any observer could hope to: The activists.
“Eleven foreign relief workers from Denmark, Switzerland and the United States courageously ran into the basilica, risking their lives to bring us food and supplies,” wrote Amjad Sabarra, the Franciscan pastor of the Basilica of the Nativity, in his journal of the event. One of them was a British aid worker, Alistair Hillman. While reporters far from the gates of the church repeated IDF statements that the church contained large reserves of food and medical supplies, Hillman wrote in his journal, subsequently published in the activist-centric website, Squall, that “the Palestinians had not eaten properly for weeks. Many were gaunt in the face and all looked thin. Most people spent the day lying down due to a lack of energy and a desire to conserve their resources. There were a few people who were obviously ill having become run down and open to disease. One man was falling in and out of consciousness and occasionally having fits. It is testimony to the strength of the Palestinian people that throughout this hardship their morale remained high.”
Hillman and his group brought with them rucksacks stuffed with food, medical supplies and cigarettes. Obviously he had his own bent. Obviously he was a partisan observer. But he left with anecdotes, details and drama that engages readers and provides the best sort of connections that can keep a reader’s attention and possibly educate them about an event happening somewhere else on the planet and why it’s at all important. And more accurate. News stories relied on press releases alleging that everyone in the church compound was a militant or a hostage. Hillman got to know people’s names, get their stories and find out just who was who. This, in turn, actually led to plain, old reporting that was also ahead of what the professionals were able to muster from the other side of the wall. “Altogether,” Hillman wrote, “there were about 180 people inside the church, but it is difficult to be accurate as everyone was spread throughout the complex. There were thirty priests from the Armenian, Franciscan and Greek Orthodox traditions who share the church in an uneasy alliance of faiths. Of the approximately 150 Palestinians, about two thirds were civilians the remaining third armed. All those present were adult males excepting a handful of nuns and the three female international activists. It was clear that all those present were there of their own accord and that early reports of a hostage situation were totally unfounded.”
This isn’t to say every journalist needed to storm the gates and stand with Palestinian folks inside just to gnaw on some grass so they can be sure they describe the taste right in their dispatches. And everyone needs to keep a grip on their own level of risk-taking. But there’s no more bias inherent from getting your stories from those under siege than there is from getting your stories from officials orchestrating the siege. There were stories on both sides of the wall, but, you know, there are stories and then there’s The Story. It’s difficult to argue that The Story was anywhere but inside that church. Activists got closer to it. They got The Story, though most of their announcements were qualified in the news or dismissed as partisan quips by interlopers. But if their version of events was so suspect to rough-and-tumble foreign corespondents, why couldn’t one of two of them — not exactly a group locals themselves for the most part — at least follow the activists’ lead, perform a tuck-and-roll to get passed the military’s official statements and see if what these people were describing from inside was at all accurate. The siege story, for all it’s potential drama and human elements, was reduced to a series of press releases occasionally punctuated by a tally on bullets spent by snipers.
One group involved the siege exemplified nonfiction Zadie. The other group didn’t. The group that didn’t consisted of educated, trained, paid journalists who turned out dull, abstract, bland copy that offered little information that folks couldn’t divine from a quick scan of the headlines. Fewer people see the need to read papers much further passed the headlines, which begins to blend in with fewer people feeling the need to read newspapers at all.
The result is that newspaper companies run expensive readership surveys that consistently come back with demands for more stories readers can relate to, and that tends to be interpreted as calls for more features about trends in barbecue cooking and canned how-to guides on selecting the appropriate back-to-school backpack for your third grader. They miss the point of the response: “relate to” does not translate into “bored silly by mind-numbing pabulum.” Meanwhile, circulation figures continue to decline and more surveys are ordered where readers maintain their as-of-yet unheeded call for stories they can relate to.
Is there a greater call for thousands of newspapers across the nation to run recipe pages full of “comfort food” instead of the gutting of Medicare and where ammunition paid for by U.S. tax dollars is landing? Are people retreating from the crude realities of life due to some post-Sept. 11 nationwide ostrich syndrome?
Hardly. Since the president’s war on terrorism began, U.S. consumption of international media (many of them outlets with much less hesitancy than the more prudish American press to publish the gruesome results of wars, riots, nude beaches, natural disasters, bullfights, etc.) jumped. The British newspaper The Guardian saw a spike in website traffic originating from North America, as did the BBC. Al Jazeera — the Arab world’s version of CNN, with its Osama bin Laden videos and footage of captured, injured or killed U.S. troops — found it had a large enough Western market to create a daily updating english version of its online presence, complete with a separate staff to provide content.
After perusing screen grabs of suicide bomber leftovers, flaming Iraqi corpses and Palestinian children sans limbs, what aren’t these people willing to look at? Well, across the United States, newspaper readership has continued a steady decline. Numerous surveys and readership polls peg it at slightly different degrees, but they all seem to agree that the arrow is pointing downward. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the average daily circulation of papers across the nation continued steady, if not rapid, growth from 58,881,746 in 1960, to 62,766,232 in 1985. After that, it’s been a series of gradual declines mixed with steep dives. going into 2001, the association found combined circulation at 55,578,046. More people wandering around the country than in 1960, fewer newspapers landing on doorsteps.
One argument to explain this would be the rise of 24-hour news channels and the internet’s constantly updating feed of information. These twin engines of information delivery certainly play some part the circulation decline from 62 million in 1990 to 58 million around 1995. The phenomenon of constant access was fairly new for the bulk of Americans during that period and the technology that came with it had that Christmas morning, new-toy appeal. But declines were already in effect in the mid-80s. Streaming video, Wolf Blitzer’s talking head in front of the White House can’t be held entirely to blame. And circulation numbers aren’t to be entirely trusted. They don’t take into account the numbers of papers people pick up off of chairs at airports or how many people read the same copy while sitting at the dentist office. And newspapers have yet to come up with a way to include their online readership into the overall numbers.
But instead of looking into any of these things, owners have opted to whine, complain, and shift blame around about who or what is at fault. But how about this: Rather than looking at what other media is doing to newspapers, it might be time to look at what newspapers are doing to themselves. They aren’t losing readers to video images so much as they’re losing readers who are opting to read other things.
The Pew Research Center released its survey on post-Sept. 11 media usage in June of 2002. While publishers have been using reader-interest polls to cut back on more costly investigative pieces and virtually wipe international news out of their papers in favor of pieces on tips to lose weight after the holidays, they might just be their own worst enemies. In the case of the world around us, the Pew report offers some insight into why these survey results turn out the way they do. A “broad interest in international news is most inhibited by the public’s lack of background information in this area,” the Pew survey authors found. “Overall, roughly two-thirds (65%) of those with moderate or low interest in international news say they sometimes lose interest in these stories because they lack the background information to keep up. The poll finds fewer people explaining their lack of international news interest in terms of repetitiveness of overseas news, its remoteness, or excessive coverage of wars and violence.”
Sounds an awful lot like a plea for context instead of requests for lighter fare. “People are increasingly turning away from newspapers, but they have not given up on reading,” the survey authors learned. “Roughly a third said they spend time reading a book the previous day, no change since the mid-1990s.” However, “Americans under 35 are more likely to read a book on a typical day than to read a newspaper.”
Book publishers have noted the trend. Bibliographic information broker R.R. Bowker announced that 2002 saw a 5.86 percent increase in the number of book titles released in the United States, with adult fiction leading the pack of more than 150,000 offerings. Also in that number, the university presses — usually content with the captive audience of college kids — “saw a golden opportunity to reach a general trade market desperate for perspective and understanding after the terrorist attacks,” said R.R. Bowker’s Andrew Grabios. Such books might have claimed more territory on Barnes & Noble display tables, but sales of these declined 3.8 percent, proving that it is a beautiful but rare creature that will wade through the works of Noam Chompski by choice. Overall, nonfiction and fiction combined, The Association of American Publishers said book sales in 2002 approached $27 billion, a 5.5 percent increase from 2001 sales.
Bookworms aren’t exactly escapists. And similar to the shopper of foreign news offerings, the avid fiction reader is not a queasy beast. Whether it’s Brett Easton Ellis’ artfully written snuff-porn-as-social-commentary in American Psycho, Alice Sebold’s raped-and-murdered narrator (”But by the time the Gilbert’s dog found my elbow…”) in The Lovely Bones, or any of the gruesomeness that Stephen King churns onto bestseller lists, there’s plenty of prose to make readers flinch, and they pay for the luxury.
It’s not that readers are solely seeking out all the lurid ugliness in the world (Chuck Palahniuk fans not withstanding) to satisfy some base urge with the printed word that they could not soothe at www.rotten.com’s collection of Jenin massacre photos or via the Faces of Death video series. These are not those people. More visceral in nature, those people (and not these) are not a significant portion of customers dropping daily newspaper subscriptions and are not among the increasing throngs of novel buyers.
Reason, truth and context are for sale, not just naughty bits. A vast majority of news articles contain no descriptions of violence and yet fewer people are reading them. A wide selection of best-seller-list titles are being picked up by a growing number of fans who lay down their cash already knowing that there will be no blood or guts described between the covers. Jonathan Franzen, Judy Blume and scads of other writers have wildly successful gore-free offerings, have stacking careers on what they thing people want to read. They’re doing pretty well for themselves.
Roy Peter Clark is a senior scholar with the Poynter Institute, a wonky think-tank and ongoing seminar provider on all things relating to the Fourth Estate. He wrote “Ain’t Done Yet,” a serialized novel that appeared in 15 newspapers around the nation, with chapters meant to be read in about the time it takes to get to the bottom of a bowl of Wheaties. Clark noted in his online column, “Writing the Newspaper Novel,” that his endeavor was not the first, and that O. Henry was hired by Joseph Pulitzer to pen a short works of fiction each week for the New York World.
Clark believes there’s much newspapers can learn from the author of “The Gift of the Magi,” and fiction writers in general. “By no means would I argue that fiction is the salvation of newspapers,” Clark writes. “But I am tempted by the thought of what might happen if newspapers became more ‘literary.’ Let’s put fiction aside for the moment. What if newspapers were to contain more history, biography, oral history, memoir, condensed books of nonfiction, and Playboy-style interviews?”
More interesting is one answer. More relevant is another.
“News is about to be what people want to get, not what the news organization tells them they need,” offered Alberto Lopez, the UberMedia director for Motorola, in a pithy manifesto on evolving news use in the digital age. Such statements drive The newspaper publishers into a tizzy. Dark predictions of the end of print are revived from when TV was going to kill it, which were revived from when radio was going to kill it. Suffice to say, a deadline-obsessed industry tends to lean a bit heavily on the Panic Button. In this case, it’s because the print news industry has yet to figure out what the book publishing industry has discovered. Newspapers are operated as if they’re actually competing against television, radio, wide-band streaming video, baseball scores delivered directly to cell-phones and pagers, and everything else up to and including other newspapers. Publishing houses operate as if they’re competing for people inclined to read.
Newspapers are not the front line of breaking news anymore. Page One redesigns that package more elements into cramped spaces, make stories smaller, use flashier graphics and more type faces don’t do anything to address the content. They do everything to make publications look more like websites for CNN’s Headline News. It looks fake and people aren’t that easily fooled. They realize they are not holding a website. Instead of mimicking other forms — reinforcing newspapers’ weaknesses — why not play to strengths; the power of a strong narrative has its own inherent appeal.
“What if,” Clark writes, “there were a new medium — let’s call it the newspaper — that offered a chance for us to think, understand, reflect, and enjoy?”
LIFE: It was in January of 2000 that I started what would be five and a half years of taking a delete-key hatchet to 30-inch stories off the national and world wires until they fit into 8-inch rectangles surrounded by “zero down-payment” Hyundai pitches and half-off jacuzzi offers. The much-promised Y2K computer snafu — that now-forgotten catastrophe which promised to thrust us all into a luddite paradise where we’d assume living standards of the Amish — had failed to transpire. Midnight met with resounding cheers as the lights stayed on and the music blared, and while I was blanketed in a warm feeling with the knowledge that my microwave would still heat fajitas and my CD collection had had not been reduced to a vast set of coasters, there was also a tinge of sadness as I realized I would actually have to show up for my new job the following day. That the future, though never really in doubt, was now certain. I would be the axe man for countless scribes who would never realize the brutal future in store for the offspring of their painstaking toil.
Much of that would be ab out the Israeli palestinian conflict. A few months after I started that job, something called the al-Aqsa intifada would begin.
“For the uninvolved visitor,” The Lonely Planet guide to Israel & the Palestinian Territories says, Haram al-Sharif “is a relaxing contrast to the noise and congestion of the surrounding narrow streets.” Being that the place’s entire significance relies entirely on religious conviction, be it Muslim, Jewish or Christian, It’s difficult to fathom who the authors were thinking of. What sort of “uninvolved” person would plunk down the thick wad of cash it takes to fly into nexus of Mideast stress, suffer through a barrage of airport interrogations and stay in overpriced air-conditioned hotels or cheap, far-cry-from-hygienic hostels just to take a glimpse at the place where God allegedly badgered Abraham into nearly killing his son before saying “psyche! Just seeing if I could get you to do it, sucker.” Not exactly the destination to go on a Dave Eggers type “You Shall Know Our Velocity” lark. The site of the Solomon’s Temple and Temple Mount is also home to the Dome of the Rock, the Islamic Museum and Al-Aqsa Mosque. Muslims have prayed at the site for more than 1,300 years and consider it to be the place (the Dome of the Rock specifically) where the Prophet Mohammed rocketed off the planet to take his seat next to Allah.
Located in Arab East Jerusalem and, according to international law, occupied illegally by Israel since 1967, The site is also revered by religious Jews as the site where a temple was destroyed in 70 AD. Haram al-Sharif is, as Suzanne Goldenberg, put it in the UK newspaper The Guardian, “the point where history, religion and national aspiration converge.”
Hardly meeting the Lonely Planet guide’s definition of “uninvolved,” the leader of the far-right Likud party and not-quite-yet Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon took a jaunt up to Haram ash-Sharif during tourist hours on Sept. 29, 2000, along with more than 1,000 armed guards and some Likud favorites to wander around Islam’s third holiest shrine, the golden Dome of the Rock.
But surely Sharon just wanted his friends to see the place, and not to appear more right-wing than the challenger for the Likud leadership. After all, it was a nice cay. His report right after the field trip: “The Temple Mount is in our hands and will remain in our hands.”
That day the al-Aqsa intifada was born. The Arabic word “Intifada” has been loosely translated into “uprising. More literally, it means “shaking off.” By the time Sharon and his groupies had left East Jerusalem, at least four Palestinians had been killed at the start of the shaking off and many others, along with Israeli security officers were injured in rioting and clashes. The city was embroiled in fires and gunfire. As Goldenberg described the scene: “Young Palestinians heaved chairs, stones, rubbish bins, and whatever missiles came to hand at the Israeli forces. Riot police retaliated with tear gas and rubber bullets, shooting one protester in the face. … The symbolism of the visit to the Haram by Mr Sharon - reviled for his role in the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in a refugee camp in Lebanon - and its timing was unmistakable.”
Five days a week, I read just about every Associated Press, Newsday, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Gannett dispatch from the Mideast. Through my duty to cull news from around the globe to be buried deep within the ink-stained A-section, I’ve managed to read some account of nearly every one the thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis who’ve been killed in this thing that no one will admit is a war. To a much lesser extent, I’ve seen coverage of some of the over 10,000 Palestinian homes razed by tanks and bulldozers, of the 160 schools in Occupied Territories destroyed due to battles or to create “security parameters.” I saw the chronicles depicting a few of the more than two thousand Palestinian children wounded by military gunfire. Read scattered accounts of the thousands of Palestinian farmers who lost crops, lost livelihoods as a result of military raids carried out under the guise of creating security. In other words, I’ve read a lot of numbers. It’s desensitizing. After a while, the thing that bugged me the most was that the stories I was reading day in and out at weren’t bugging me.
AN ADMISSION: There’s this little ritual I had when I’d get to work. It’s a tad on the macabre side. After checking for fresh coffee and before perusing news budgets, I’d fire up the Associated Press photo desk and type four syllables into the text field. They spell “graphic content.”
Graphic Content searches are usually a morbid tour through what humanity at its worst has to offer, unless it happens to be Fashion Week in Brazil, which also seems to show up with that search. On most days, not counting those since the start of the Iraq war, one or two images show up. Some photog might have snapped the aftermath of a car bomb somewhere in the Philippines. A newly discovered mass grave could have been unearthed in El Salvador. Maybe a politician was immortalized mid-assassination in Colombia. Most often the photos originate from Jerusalem, Gaza, or somewhere in the West Bank. On the days nothing shows up for “graphic content,” there are a couple of other words to try. As of late, they’ve been sure things. One is “Israel,” and the other is “Palestinian.”
A series of photos once depicted a young boy being shot in the crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian “gunmen” as his father clutched him and tried to shield his son with his own body. There are many depicting young Palestinian men, just shot and being grieved over by their families. Still others show the gruesome aftermath of suicide explosions on packed buses and in busy coffee shops in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and still more grieving.
As a policy, the newspaper where I worked doesn’t run such photos. Most mainstream U.S. publications have similar policies.
For the most part, I don’t think it’s a bad policy. What are newspapers showing people? Why are they showing it? What are readers going to get for having seen them? But more often than not, I’ve been wondering if newspapers aren’t starting to hide a bit too much of the world from their readers. More and more, I think they’re noticing.
“Fiction, at its best, is a radical art of intimacy,” Stacey D’Erasmo writes in her New York Times review of Stewart O’Nan’s novel, Everyday People. “It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked. As readers, we sense when the game is being played for real and when something else is afoot …. I dislike closing a book with the sense that I’ve been had.”
What if we substituted “journalism” for “fiction”? “Newspaper” for “book”?
In D’Erasmo’s estimation, O’Nan lived up to her high standards for intimacy over the course of six books, but falters with Everyday People. While she says he possesses a “protean imagination” and “is a writer who reaches out, both making and bridging worlds,” she finds the O’Nan’s inhabitants of a poor, predominantly African-American neighborhood in Pittsburgh come off like “figures cut out of felt.” While O’Nan is “a tender witness to quotidian struggles of his creations,” D’Erasmo writes “there is no doubt that O’Nan means well, but the lack of surprise and psychological inventiveness inadvertently suggests that people with less money have fewer, and less complicated, emotions.” In conclusion, she adds “all of which is to say that I prefer O’Nan off the leash of his own best intentions. Readers, like writers, are essentially amoral. Arms length will never do. We want to get closer.”
I’d like to suggest now, that D’Erasmo has come up with about as perfect a description of people who read as we’re going to get. And that this description will never be arrived at through a survey of newspaper readership trends. However, if newspapers are to do the one thing that can reverse their declining circulation numbers and seriously court people who are inclined to read, they need to look at what readers are actually reading, and why.
For as small a piece of the world it is, and as little of the entire planet’s population that exists there, the Mideast Conflict consumes a disproportionate amount of real estate inside U.S. newspapers on a daily basis except when the United States is attacking Iraq. More gallons of ink gets spilled per gallon of blood than in any other ongoing conflict. That ratio increases if the blood happens to come from an Israeli, or, on rare occasion, an American, or at least some white person.
I worked for a time as a professional reader. It was my job to look for holes in copy. Find inaccuracies, verify facts, fix poorly written paragraphs, make sure names are spelled correctly, delve into prickly issues surrounding appropriate hyphenation, etc. If I were looking at a locally produced story, matters of verification would be as simple as talking to the reporter who is sitting just across the room, or realizing that they meant “Plum St.” Instead of “Plum Ave.” But what do you do when you’re a wire editor and the stories coming from halfway around the world don’t seem to jive with what you’re only vaguely aware to be the way things are?
You’re not there, so you’re sense of what is happening there is entirely dependent on the various sources of information you choose to consume. And yet there’s that other thing. It’s less tangible. It’s the knowledge we have about people. It’s the ability to see Archie and Samad as believable characters because they contain traits that are familiar.
I decided I needed to check some things out. I used my two weeks worth of vacation in June of 2003 to head to Jerusalem and the West Bank and meet some “Everyday People” there. I didn’t plan to achieve any journalistic opuses or bring back the definitive oral history of the Occupied Territories after just 14 days of wandering about. It takes much longer and, besides, that’s been done and is being done by far more capable individuals. And while I did employ the role of journalist from time to time, and joined activists at other times, my role was really, much more amoral than anything those two job titles would suggest. The plot in the story seemed thin, and that characters weak at times. My job title required me not to simply put the book down, and besides, unlike McTeague, there was no “The End.” Arms length wasn’t good enough. I did want to get closer. Enough people had come to Israel and the Palestinian Territories to write about it and look how that’s worked out for everyone. In 2003, I went as a reader. That — at least in part — is what led to this journey in ‘05, as an activitst.
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