Chapter 148: Reporting When You’re Part of the Story

Last week – before my university called in the police to end the takeover of a campus building and dismantle a protest encampment – I ran into one of my students and asked whether she thought her classmates needed to talk about the story unfolding around them.

I hadn’t wanted to assume that they needed to talk. But she told me that in fact they did. I explained that I was reluctant to discuss the issues themselves – which were fraught and complex and not core to what I felt was my teaching mandate. 

But I did want to talk about the journalism they were doing.

She confessed that she was not alone in feeling torn, covering a story that she felt a part of. I didn’t ask, nor did I feel it mattered, where her sympathies lay. What did matter was that she and several of her classmates had found themselves caught between wanting to take a stand in their work while reporting on what they saw and heard.

I should not have been surprised that a discussion I assumed would last for 20 minutes stretched to 90. The student who’d raised the question repeated it and my response reflected a view widely held among journalists, and many of us who teach them: that journalists possess power, or better said, the potential to play a powerful role – but only if they do their work well. This begins not with taking a stand about a story they feel connected to. But with grabbing a notebook. 

Which is when things get hard.

There had been no shortage of petitions and open letters being shared around my campus and school, and while I did not doubt the sincerity of those who signed, I believe taking a public stand on an issue precludes the possibility of covering it. 

I suspect that some who are reading this disagree and believe that my argument undermines the free expression of ideas. To be clear, I believe journalists are free to sign petitions or letters. But I also believe that doing so weakens their claim that they can still report on that issue with the necessary rigor and skepticism. Once you’ve decided to take a position on an issue, all the thinking and reporting that follows will occur in the context of that decision. 

I told my students that it is one thing to grab a notebook. It is quite another to consider what you should do when the reporting begins – when the often intellectually exhausting work of journalism starts.

Journalists see things that enrage them. They talk to people who infuriate them. Many of us come to journalism determined to expose injustice and repair the world through our work. Many of us never lose those idealistic impulses. 

The question is how to do the work the right way – and by right I do not mean objectively; unlike, say, ChatGPT, we are driven by feelings and not just the accumulation and dissemination of fact. I am not necessarily even talking about fairness, because there are things we see that are profoundly unfair.

I am talking about rigor. 

To that end, I told my students that it is imperative to go about your work by challenging your assumptions, putting pressure on your arguments, and making your case by making the case of those with whom you disagree. 

But, I added, it is a far greater challenge doing that when you are outraged, hurt, dismayed, and in despair about what you are witnessing and hearing. 

Even as I was speaking about their experience, I was also talking about my own.

I spent a lot of time over the past few weeks at the encampment protesting the war in Gaza, and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. I walked around the perimeter and then inside the make-shift tent city trying to take the measure of what I was seeing and hearing. I spoke with students about how they would resolve the call for a Palestine stretching “from the river to sea” – “that’s a tough question” replied a student who’d been arrested the first time the university called in the police. I listened as call and response chants grew angrier and, to my ears, more discomfiting: we don’t want no Zionists here…

I attended an antisemitism teach-in that the protestors had organized and that featured several Jewish students who had joined the protests and who spoke about how they could no longer accept the portrait of Israel they were taught as children. A hundred protestors sat and listened and did not look at their phones or walk away. 

I watched as House Speaker Mike Johnson seized the moment by coming to Columbia to decry the evils of antisemitism – though not mentioning the deeply antisemitic views of some members of his conference – while he played to the cameras by speaking as hundreds of students yelled and cursed at him.

I came to see that this was a story best reported not by asking people what they thought but by watching how they acted, collectively, because at its core this was a story about collective action that had brought many students together in a belief that united they can change their university. 

Then I wrote.

Writing at such moments is important because it allows you to summon what stood out, and cast aside what did not as you work your way through the impressions and scenes and try to establish some clarity. It is a humbling experience. You are, in effect, confronting yourself on the page – your thoughts and ideas and assumptions. It is the last of these that are most treacherous because they came first and inevitably informed what followed. 

I wrote very quickly and did not bother to check for grammar or spelling or even how things sounded. The writing was the second step in the process of making sense, of beginning to find some understanding. And when it was done I could see, in a way I could not hide from, how much I did not know and how much I still needed to learn.

I told my students some of this; I felt it would have been disingenuous not to say that I was doing what they were doing, and that like them, I felt a part of this story – that the work I’d been doing for the past few years on my book mattered as much to me as any reporting I’d ever done because it was so very personal.

Again and again, I explained, I found that I could only proceed not by moving forward but by going back and re-examining how I had come to believe what I believed. 

This work is as draining as it is thrilling. And that is what I wished for my students, and what I hoped to convey: that journalism, done rigorously, is deeply satisfying work, and that it can lend power and meaning to reporting that might otherwise feel expedient. I am not saying I am achieving this, just that I am trying.

My students have been covering a story that means so much to them, and because it does, they have all the more reason to do it in a way that will leave them, at turns, baffled, lost, exhausted and hopefully thrilled.

I, in turn, am thrilled for them that they care as deeply as they do. It is a gift – but one whose value emerges only if they treat it roughly – dropping it, picking it up, and assessing the damage before starting over again.

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Speaking of my students, the book they’ve been working on as part of the annual Memory Project is done and now on sale.

It’s called No One Ever Asked and it is wonderful and in it you will find sixteen terrific nonfiction short stories by writers whom you will discover here and who, I am confident, you will be reading for years to come.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week.