CCJ Traveling Curriculum trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. She blogs regularly here.
 

Years ago, I covered the funeral of a policeman who’d been killed in the line of duty. I was a very new and inexperienced reporter. I could count on one hand the number of funerals I’d been to in my entire life, and the experience was overwhelming. I was standing outside the church when a formation of police helicopters flew overhead in tribute, and I lost it. A reporter for a competing daily saw me and walked over with an air of purposeful cool. In those days, we carried our own cameras – our respective papers didn’t have any photographic staff except for high school football games – and he had his camera around his neck. I don’t know if he was trying to cover his own emotion, or if he was trying to show me how a real pro handled such a moment, but this is what he said:

“So, gotten a good shot of the ... ” – and here he did the air quotes thing with his hands – “grieving widow?”

In that moment, I thought, If this is what a journalist is, I don’t want to be one.

On the evening of Nov. 4, a number of reporters lost their composure, some of them on nationwide television. On The Daily Show’s election night coverage (which I taped, and watched later – I do depend on actual news channels for my breaking news), I noticed that when Barack Obama’s win was official, Stephen Colbert had been obliged to take off his glasses and dab at his eyes lest he damage his TV makeup, and Jon Stewart seemed visibly moved as well. The next night, Fox News’ Chris Wallace was a guest on the show and couldn’t resist teasing Stewart and Colbert for getting all misty.

“Imagine,” Stewart deadpanned. “People having human emotions to a historic moment.”

It’s just one of the many weirdnesses of the current media climate that a professional comedian does a better job of representing the press than the press does. A lot of people, including way too many journalists, seem to think that journalistic objectivity requires a kind of dry-eyed emotional detachment, to be maintained at all costs no matter what’s happening. In my book, the opposite is true. Anybody who could watch the election of the nation’s first black president without a sense of gratitude and awe for the ideals and the process that made this possible – regardless of their views on the issues or the relative merits of the candidates – doesn’t care enough about democracy to be a journalist.

We are in the midst of a seismic redefinition of what journalism is, and we are wrestling with issues of transparency and boundaries and definitions. The media circus goes on – it’s bigger than ever, in fact – but these days the public gets to go backstage and see us with our makeup off. In a way that was inconceivable even 15 years ago, our dirty little secrets and tricks of the trade are there for all to see – the way we sometimes agree to be willing conduits for somebody’s spin, our over-dependence on retinues of “experts” we have failed to vet, the way we participate in the charade of “spin rooms” after debates.

Not surprisingly, people these days tend to pick their news outlets according to the perceived “slant” of those outfits – why not, when everybody’s biased anyway? –  and journalists’ confidence in the overall integrity of their own profession seems to be sinking right along with the public’s. A Pew poll taken just before the election revealed that 70 percent of all Americans believe that the press wanted Obama to win. So when some reporters needed their hankies on election night, I have no doubt that lots of people out there threw up their hands and said, “See? What’d I tell ya? Totally in the tank.”

But objectivity does not consist of simply finding snarky things to say, and it’s not attained via some mechanical formula for giving equal time and space to opposing viewpoints. Reporters, moreover, have shown emotion in the past and nobody said a peep. Walter Cronkite had a sudden need to clean his glasses when John Kennedy was assassinated, and a few years later when we landed on the moon. Reporters who covered the civil rights movement didn’t spend much time worrying about whether the Ku Klux Klan thought their coverage was “fair and balanced.” When the space shuttle Challenger exploded, reporters wept. On 9/11, we were all traumatized.

And, yes, sometimes reporters have indeed been in the tank for an attractive, charismatic figure. It happened in the Kennedy years, and one result was that the public never learned some things it should have known – such as the fact that President Kennedy had Addison’s disease, a potentially debilitating condition that can cause things like extreme fatigue and mood swings. Yet what the press reflected of the Kennedy years was also the optimism and sense of possibility he managed to create – things that were equally real and arguably just as important for the country as the state of his health. You could say the same about the confidence President Ronald Reagan inspired in much of the country, and all those “morning in America” stories. Journalists were correct in writing stories that reflected each man’s charm and the affection he inspired among wide swaths of the public. The problem, in each case, lay with what journalists didn’t report, not what they did.

Whether or not you agree with Barack Obama’s plan for the country, you have to admit that we have witnessed something truly remarkable. In historical terms, 150 years is nothing. And now, a scant 150 years since a black man was simply a piece of property, a black man has won the presidency. He did it without presenting himself as a spokesman for any particular race, and he did it by winning 43 percent of all the white vote.

In Georgia, which is as red a state as they come, he got 47 percent of the vote. Even accounting for the support he could count on among black voters and in urban areas, this tells me that a significant number of rural white Southerners – people I grew up with, people usually referred disparagingly to as rednecks, a term widely regarded as synonymous with “racist” – went to the polls and quietly voted for … a black man. I can vividly remember the dentist’s office in Fairburn, Ga., that my mom used to take us to – the one with two waiting rooms. The signs on the doors had been taken down, but you could still read what they’d said: “White” and “Colored.” Plenty of people now living remember far worse. We have come from there to here in the space of my lifetime.

I don’t know how the press will treat Obama during the next four years. What I hope is that the tone of the news coverage does not become a photographic negative of the coverage that has characterized the Bush years – when most reporters were too timid to ask the big questions, and too many of us were all too ready to get nasty and personal about the little things. I’m hoping for good news – from Iraq, from Wall Street – but I’m also hoping, in a way, that Obama will have a tough time with the media. Anything less than that would be a monumental failure.

But getting misty-eyed on Tuesday night was not a journalistic boo-boo. If anything, it was an example of something that’s still deeply right about this profession. At some moments, we have no business behaving like that jackass so long ago who was prowling around looking for a sensational shot of the grieving widow. Some moments in life are just overwhelming – whether that moment comes during a policeman’s funeral or during the election of the nation’s first black president. Sometimes, it’s OK for a journalist to cry. And then – back to work.
 

Talk to Tracy Thompson at tracythompson@fastmail.fm.