Ian McDonaldTHE HEART and soul of a newspaper is how it reports the passing scene. Editorial comment, the contributions of columnists, cultural reviews, reproduced features sourced from elsewhere, a good letters-page all serve, of course, to build a journal of quality. But it is the truth, sharpness, colour and immediacy of a newspaper's reporting which is most vital in establishing its reputation.
Start with strict accuracy. Unless accuracy is tenaciously pursued credibility soon suffers and credibility is the central jewel in a journal's crown. But reporting, at its best, does not end with accuracy. The creative imagination can work on facts so that the presentation catches the attention of the reader and makes an impact which dull recital can never achieve.
The writing does not need to be flashy to achieve effect. One only has to re-read John Hersey's "Hiro-shima". This must be the greatest piece of extended reporting ever written. (The account took up the entire issue of The New Yorker magazine of August 31, 1946). It is an account of the experiences of six people who lived through the world's first atomic bomb attack. Hersey's reporting is so precise, his sentences and paragraphs so clear, calm, restrained, that the utter horror of the story comes through all the more chillingly. It is imbued with a profound moral sense, yet it does not preach. It does not hector. It simply tells. The power is in the reporting. Any ambitious young journalist, wanting to learn his or her trade, should hasten to read this classic.
It is not a matter of turning reportage into art. In fact to do so is not only unnecessary but can be indecent. Often truth lends reportage an impact that the embellishments of art cannot match. "The blood of the children," wrote the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, "flowed out on to the streets like .... the blood of the children". Metaphor, he suggests, would be obscene. The poet Carolyn Fouche in 1978 witnessed various atrocities committed by the military government in El Salvador. A colonel, with whom she dined one day, fetched a sack and tipped on to the table a heap of severed human ears. She considered how she might record this and still pursue her "allegiance to art". In the end she wrote a poem in which the ears are described as being "like dried peach halves." It may be a brilliant simile but in such a case aesthetic expression is, in Pablo Neruda's terms, obscene.
On the other hand consider the plain account by a reporter called John Simpson of the massacre of the students in Tiananmen Square. An armoured personnel carrier which has been zig-zagging lethally through the crowd hits a concrete obstacle and stalls just in front of Simpson. Two of the soldiers inside are dragged out and torn to pieces before his eyes. A third is having his head beaten in with a brick when Simpson intervenes, snatches the brick, and saves the man's life. As he throws away the brick: "It felt wet". Those three words, bare of interpretation, reflection, any elaboration contain the essence of reporting and is far away as you can get from cut-off human ears reported as peach halves.
Images
What is important is to call up plain, truthful images which do not easily fade. These may be the simplest of side observations in scenes of utmost drama: James Fenton, for instance, describing the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese looters storming through the doomed city, US helicopters snatching the last refugees, tanks marauding, flames leaping, guns firing all around, and amidst it all Fenton takes time to notice the extraordinary number of iridescent dragon flies dancing in the air.
For countless examples of the truth and impact of good reporting let the aspiring young journalist get hold of a book in which I browse from time to time with great enjoyment the Faber Book of Reportage. Time and again a few words become as vivid as a thousand pictures Samuel Wilkeson's dispatch from the battlefield of Gettys-burg, written beside the dead body of his son; Mata Hari drawing on her flimsy stockings on the morning of her execution; the swords unsheathed at Balaclava like "the turn of a shoal of mackerel;" the assassin Booth catching his boot-heel in the drapery around Lincoln's theatre box; in the great Irish famine the starving people with their mouths green from their diet of grass; the Jewish father by the mass grave waiting to be shot, comforting his son and pointing to the sky.
Supremacy
The journalist in general, and the reporter in particular, need not consider himself or herself a second-class citizen in the world of letters. If the work is done well its impact can be as great or even greater than that of the best imaginative literature. After all, the texts that have counted for most in human history the holy books of world religions, including the gospels owe their supremacy to being factual. As John Carey, who compiled the Faber book, points out: at the highest level "reportage may change its readers, may educate their sympathies, may extend in both directions their ideas about what it is to be a human being, may limit their capacity for the inhuman. These gains have traditionally been claimed for imaginative literature. But since reportage, unlike literature, lifts the screen from reality, its lessons are and ought to be more telling; and since it reaches millions untouched by literature, it has an incalculably greater potential."
I once read, and noted the effect in my journal, an article in which a correspondent, Svetlana Alexiyevich, interviews a number of ordinary Russian women who lost sons in the war in Afghanistan. There is nothing remotely sensational just memories of what the men were like as boys and descriptions of mothers going to collect the coffins when they were flown home. But tears came to my eyes. The best reporting always does that it uncovers the human face of history and initiates us into a grief and in other cases a joy, a drama we did not share.
Ian McDonald is a regular contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
