Confessions of a News Man

Tall tales from the City of Gold, our time with Gorgeous George (Clooney) and the mainstream media's natural bee sting...

“I do not claim to know that which I do not know”

~ Socrates

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World...

It’s Easter weekend down here in the Paris of the South and the Latinos are spending time with their families, enjoying some well-earned respite from the quotidian march. 

Taking our cue from the locals, we likewise indulge a break from the news today. Well, sort of. A break from “new news,” at least...

The season has turned down here at the End of the World. Gone are the dog days of summer, the sweltering, inescapable heat in the city. At the ~34th parallel south, Buenos Aires is roughly the same distance from the equator as Los Angeles, CA., in the north. (See also Beirut, Tibet and Wakayama Prefecture, for our international readers...)

More locally, we’ve chosen a little cafe, La Noir, in the up and coming Colegiales barrio, to relay today’s little tale. A couple of photos, to set the scene...

(Photos: Joel)

The World, As Advertised

The cheerful young waitress delivers a strong flat white. Through the window the afternoon sun shines across our “desk.” A humble bee, whose life we graciously spared but moments ago, stings our finger. (Left, index.) And so we begin on safe, familiar ground...the world presenting more or less as advertised. 

In recent Notes, we began contemplating the role of the once-proud Fourth Estate, fallen so low in recent times. Readers must have wondered, what beef have we with the popular press? What searing personal grievances do we harbor against the mainstream media? 

No beef, dear reader. No grievance. We accept the follies and foibles of the chattering class like we accept a bee sting on the finger. Which is to say, naturally. 

It is in our nature, curious mammals that we are, to look for patterns to explain the world around us. And when we find none (at least as decipherable to our poorly evolved brains), we are only too happy to invent them. Some anthropologists even suggest it was Homo Sapien’s ability to “mythologize” (essentially, to indulge flights of fancy) that gave us our edge over the larger, more powerful Neanderthalensis, lending us the ability to organize in large numbers and therefore “out strategize” our early human competitors. 

Mostly, we recognize these tall tales for what they are... necessarily incomplete fictions, subject to the whim and caprices of interpretation. We call them “entertainments” or “mythologies” or “legends.” Occasionally, we bestow on them the gravitas bound up with “news,” where we pretend what we’re hearing is fact.

Sometimes these tall tales serve us well (as instructive fables, for example, like those cautionary tales of ol’ Aesop). We may even derive a certain heuristical value from traditions, anecdotes and “rules of thumb,” passed down over generations. 

Other times, our tendency to fictionalize, to propagandize, leads to disastrous results (such as when we are duped into marching off to some cursed war on the other side of the planet, or convinced to drink the Kool-Aid as the pending apocalypse draws nigh). 

For good or ill, it seems that mythologizing is simply part of our nature. As the iconic American author and reporter, Joan Didion, once wrote: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. 

Occupational Hazards

When we read the news (something of an occupational hazard), we find this laid bare; journalists telling tall tales, their imaginations running wild, committing lies of commission and omission both. We recognize this tendency well, because we were miseducated among its purveyors...

That is to say, we trained as a journalist during our mispent college years, back in our birth country of Australia. Fortunately, our university campus was located along a renowned stretch of coastline, home to some of the best surf breaks on the planet... so we rarely made it to class on time, when we bothered attending at all. (This turned out all for the better, as we had less to “unlearn” than our fully-programmed coevals.) 

Even so, we recall many a lofty statement made, many a brave flag hoisted, by earnest professors (who chose, doubtless for reasons of unadulterated altruism, not to pursue their own media career...but rather to instruct others on how to do so). 

Our mission, they informed us from beyond the lectern, was to “Speak truth to power!” and, on less sure ground, to  “Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” Hmm...

Even at the time the statements rang eerily hollow, though we couldn’t then have told you exactly why. But the lip service was there, for whatever that was worth. A goal, even if nobody really believed in it. 

Over the years, sand between our toes, your walkabout editor found himself scribbling for both the mainstream and so-called “alternative” media around the world. Reporting from Americas North and South, Easts Middle and Far, and all across Europe, too, we filed copy from “cities that never close down, from New York to Rio and old London town.” 

The experience was... edifying. 

Boots on Dunes

In Dubai, we once interviewed the regional head of S&P ratings agency... who dutifully assured us that the credit structure of the booming Emirate was on solid ground... weeks before the “Dububble” (a term we coined) popped and the "Sheikhy Mo," as he was referred to among newspapermen, had to lean on his cousin (brother? uncle?) in Abu Dhabi for a bit of walking around money. 

(The senior Emir obliged with a bridging loan... though not before demanding that the world’s tallest building, the Burj Dubai, be renamed in his honor, as Burj Khalifa. We’re sure Herr Freud would have nothing to say here. Sometimes a giant erection in the desert is just a giant erection in the desert.)

We also attended (our first day on the job!) the press conference for the locally-filmed motion picture, Syriana, during which we had the opportunity to put a few innocent questions to the dashing lead man, George Clooney. 

“Mister Clooney – can I call you Cloonster? No, ok... – well, you’ve shone your luminous star power on various human rights abuses around the world in the past. Anything you’ve noticed during your time here in Dubai that you’d like to bring to the world’s attention?”

[Awkward silence... papers shuffling... a pin dropping somewhere near the back of the room...]

“I can say I’ve really enjoyed my time in Dubai... [flashes Hollywood smile]... working with the many professional people who...”

“Right, right. I’m sure it’s been a hoot, Cloonst... sorry, Mister Clooney. But surely there’s something you’d like to say about the indentured servitude of the enslaved construction workers here... their confiscated passports... subhuman living conditions... the undercounted death tolls at construction accidents... the...”

It was around this moment, as we recall, when the actors were suddenly called away on what we assume must have been very, very important business (you know, because... actors). 

It was also around this time, having listened to the other “journalists” in the room pitch all the usual softballs (“Of all the amazing places you’ve been around the world, Mr. Clooney, which would you say comes in second, behind Dubai?” etc.) that we began suspecting something was amiss...

Tall Buildings, Taller Tales

Neither were the ringers for major foreign publications demonstrably better. Reporters for global newswires routinely misrepresented facts, omitted inconvenient truths and told outright lies. Even if an earnest newbie could, somehow, capture “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” in a pithy, 500-word “hard news” article, by the time the copy went through the editorial sausage maker, any chance of a story somehow replicating faithfully the “facts on the ground” had long since melted away, like a snowflake in the dunes. 

And yet, was this so very different from our experience working from the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, in NYC, in an office overlooking the New York Stock Exchange? There we tapped away in a small suite off to the corner of a sprawling trading floor. From espresso o’clock in the morning until long after happy hour, we listened to men in suits and ties yelling into phones, concocting stories about why this commodity was poised for a breakout or that equity due for a sudden correction. 

Sometimes right, oftentimes wrong, they were the tall tales of the day, authored in real time and disseminated from trading desks to newsrooms and dining rooms across America... and the world. 

Of course, the real story is infinitely more complex than any single article can possibly convey... than any soundbite or gotcha moment can adequately capture... any snapshot or passing fad or so-called “news cycle” can hope to register. Moreover, it takes a lifetime of mistakes, false starts, dead ends and reexamined premises to arrive even at this basic starting point.

As for the mainstream media, we do not begrudge the reporter his mistruths any more than we do the bee his sting. We seek only to understand their nature as part of the bigger picture...and to refrain, in the wise words of that ol’ gadfly quoted above, from claiming to know that which we do not know along the way. 

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Joel Bowman

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