Journalism and Celebrity

I spent what little spare time I had during my undergraduate years working at the student newspaper of my University. Carleton is Canada's most prominent school for journalism so it shouldn't surprise anyone that most of my friends from school are journalists or writers now.

Recently, a Canadian reporter was captured, held hostage and eventually released by either a group of petty criminals or some weak offshoot of the Taliban in Afghanistan. I'm not sure if Melissa Fung went to Carleton or not. She was not at the Charlatan during the time I was there but it did get me thinking first about the friends I do have who work as foreign correspondents and then about the job of the journalist in general and what happens when a writer's safety is put at risk for the content of an article or simply for being a writer.

I do have some personal experience with this, although nothing at all to compare with Melissa Fung's terrible ordeal. Nevertheless, I can remember very clearly how it felt first to be threatened simply for being myself and then to be the subject of media scrutiny for the way I chose to cope with the threat itself.

I decided the best way to deal with the person levelling death threats at my was to "out" him. It worked very well. As it turned out, I wasn't the only woman he was threatening and my first-person piece on the subject prompted his other victims to come forward and ultimately resulted in his arrest. All of that is well and good, it is what journalism, in my opinion, is for. We write as members of the public in order to first serve as the eyes and ears of an event or experience and then to be a voice for those involved. Pretensions of objectivity aside - writers tell their own stories because they are universal stories. That's what makes first-person reporting work.

Previous to writing this piece I had experienced the occasional threat of physical violence and had a stalker or two - none of this is very unusual for an opinionated female journalist. None of it bothered me much. I was glad my piece did its work and hoped to find myself in a situation where I could write a story with a similar impact without it having to involve something so intimate as a threat to my own life. The story was reprinted a few times and that should have been the end of it.

It was not the end of it. Because of this story, I found myself at the centre of a number of events, none of which had anything to do with my writing and all of which had a lot to do with celebrity.

Radio shows wanted a statement, then they wanted me to appear on talk-shows. Carleton gave me an award and my acceptance speech was broadcast. All of that was alright as these things go but when TV networks wanted to do a story on me, I foolishly said yes. Couldn't think of a reason not to and I had at least partly swallowed the idea that publicity is a good thing in and of itself. When I was faced with a cameraman and a surly national TV news reporter saying I had to show my face on camera or he would say I was afraid, something inside me went off.

My "cover" as a reporter was completely blown and I realized I had moved from telling a worthwhile story to being a story that was not very worthwhile at all. And it continued. No matter what I did I could not get away from that story. It meant that I had a position and that position was static in the eyes of editors. I was a "victim's rights advocate" - no longer a journalist. Later that year, I returned to Victoria for the summer and staged an arts event and found, once again, I was positioned squarely at the centre of the story.

I'm not suggesting I was blameless in this but I am saying that we are turning into a society where it is all too easy for dedicated, passionate reporters to become one-note songwriters simply because they do a good job on a particularly noteworthy piece.

Attention is always nice, I suppose but when attention becomes the goal imposed by the culture we live in, the work falters. I stopped writing important pieces after that year, I had to. For one thing I couldn't go anywhere politically questionable or ask any meaningful questions of sources who might have something to hide and might need finessing, without being recognized, for another - I was so disgusted with the personal fallout I experienced as a result of publishing that piece that I just couldn't stomach the idea of going through it again.

Some writers are in their profession in order to be famous - most are not. The assumption that public attention is always welcome is a dangerous one, it strips writers of the tools they need to become better at their craft. It creates a lot of media static. I don't know what was nudged aside on those nights (and it was nights - one of my friends made a joke about having seen the back of my head on TV every night that week) when "my story" ran on the 11 o-clock news but I am reasonably sure it was a hell of a lot more important than talking about how one student journalist managed to deal with one whack-job death threat.

I am worried for my friends' safety when they are travelling through the middle east. I think about friends and colleagues in dangerous parts of the world and even those who are here at home writing about the easy things who may be gay or may have views that put them at risk - all it takes is one editorial, I've received death threats for pointing out something as innocuous as reverse racism. It goes with the job. But as concerned as I am about those things I am more concerned about the way the culture of celebrity strips those of us who want to be the eyes and ears of the public of the means to do so.

Melissa Fung will never be able to "pass" as a regular member of the public again. Her work will suffer for it and we, as a reading public, will suffer for her loss. She is safe and sound, thank God but she is silenced and that can't be right.

As for me, I stopped reporting the hard stuff and moved into communications and now I am rethinking that decision. Maybe it was too easy to be self-righteous and step back to paid-by-the-hour policy analysis. Maybe having every right to make that choice doesn't make it the right choice to make.

We need journalists who care. We need to let them care and for those of us who find ourselves faced with that choice, we need to find a better way around it than choosing to feed the appetite we created for junk journalism or remove ourselves from the news cycle out of disgust. Nobody benefits from a choice like that.