I got an e-mail the other day from Jed Barton, one of those blasts from the past that take you back in time.
Twenty years ago, I was a reporter at the
Providence Journal when a call came into the newsroom with a story tip.
We've all gotten them: "Check out the mayor's travel budget," whispers the anonymous voice on the phone. "Something stinks in the..." Housing Authority, Police Department, the drainage pipes at the riverfront factory, or any number of cesspools described in the letters without signatures mailed to the City Desk.
Then there are the more innocent calls. "Hey, there's a pepper in my garden looks just like Richard Nixon! Wanna send out a photographer?"
This time, the caller wanted to tell us about a fascinating seven-year-old in our community.
He's a great kid.
Uh-huh.
Goes to second grade.
That's nice.
Rides a bike. Swims at the Y.
Yeah??
Oh and he's blind.
This time the tip panned out.
Jed Barton was a great kid. Born premature, he lost his vision in the incubator before doctors realized that the oxygen levels that kept him alive also left him permanently blind. The account of his parent's successful struggle to give him a normal life made for
a poignant and heartening story.
So it was a thrill to hear from Jed, who'd come across my name on the Web and wanted to get in touch.
Jed is
now in his late 20s, the founder of an
Internet radio station. I was delighted to hear from him because Jed and his mother Debbie taught me an important lesson about vision: you don't need eyesight to really see.
Reconnecting with Jed -- and remembering how this child made his way in the world -- put me in mind of one of my favorite quotes, this one uttered by Joseph Conrad, author of "The Heart of Darkness" and other classic novels.
"My task," said Conrad, "which I am trying to achieve, is -- by the power of the written word -- to make you hear, to make you feel. It is, before all, to make you see. That -- and no more. And it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm -- all you demand -- and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
Conrad was talking about the role of the writer, but I believe his philosophy is eminently suitable to describe the vital responsibility that journalism must shoulder as we enter a new century.
Journalists have the power and the duty to make us see our world, even parts we might prefer not to see. One journalist who has used her skills this way is Katherine Boo of
The Washington Post.
In 1999, Boo wrote a series called "Invisible Lives: Invisible Deaths" that brought to light the shameful failures of the District of Columbia's taxpayer-funded network for the mentally retarded.
Here's the opening of the first story of Boo's series:
Elroy lives here. Tiny, half-blind, mentally retarded, 39-year-old Elroy. To find him, go past the counselor flirting on the phone. Past the broken chairs, the roach-dappled kitchen and housemates whose neglect in this group home has been chronicled for a decade in the files of city agencies. Head upstairs to Elroy's single bed.
"You're in good hands," reads the Allstate Insurance poster tacked above his mattress -- the mattress where the sexual predator would catch him sleeping. Catch him easily: The door between their rooms had fallen from its hinges. Catch him relentlessly -- so relentlessly that Elroy tried to commit suicide by running blindly into a busy Southeast Washington street.
Elroy was an unforgettable emblem of a broken-down system where hundreds of incidents of abuse, neglect, molestation or stealing were documented in group homes and day programs, where a convicted embezzler, a psychologist who billed the government for treating the dead and a man who paid go-go dancers as "group home consultants" were among those paid by the District to run group homes and therapeutic programs for the retarded.
In the name of taxpayer-financed "day treatment," some of the District's retarded wards were dispatched by the city to work for wages as low as 50 cents a week -- work for which their day-program owners profited through private contracts. Other retarded people, in the name of therapy, shoveled manure at a group home operator's private farm.
Through her reporting and writing, Kate Boo marshaled the
power of reported detail to make us see. She made the District of Columbia and readers of the
Washington Post see things that I would argue most had never seen, and most probably didn't want to see. This is what journalism can do.
After her
series was published, major systematic reforms were made and the U.S. Justice Department conducted a special probe into the quality of care provided by government-funded District facilities.
Kate Boo won for her paper the Pulitzer gold medal for public service, journalism's highest honor.
Last September, she was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur fellowship, the ones handed out to geniuses, to continue her work chronicling the lives of the poor and disadvantaged. For Boo, the award came "at the end of a particularly lousy year," she said. "I struggled not to lose faith in the ability of words to make any difference whatsoever."
But stories, whether written with words or pictures, audio or video, can make a difference. Now more than ever, as we face a world made uncertain by terrorism and a future darkened by war, the role of journalism to make us see our world seems never more important.
Technology, ironically, has put us back around the campfire hanging on the storyteller's words. We get the news on the radio, on cell phones and Palm Pilots, via the alphabet soup of 24-hour cable. But it's not enough.
As Jack Fuller, the chairman of the Tribune Company, says in his thoughtful and thought-provoking book, "News Values: Ideas for an Information Age," "People come to a newspaper craving a unifying human presence -- the narrator in a piece of fiction, the guide who knows the way, or the colleague whose view one values. Readers don't just want random snatches of information flying at them from out of the ether. They want information that hangs together, makes sense, has some degree of order to it. They want knowledge rather than facts, perhaps even a little wisdom."
With their stories, journalists can continue to offer us encouragement, consolation, fear, charm -- all we demand -- and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which we forget to ask.
For all our sakes, I hope that journalists will continue to focus the light of public attention on the news and stories that define our age and reveal the joys and costs of being human.
I hope that you will continue to make us see the things that we need to see, to make us see the things we may not want to see.
Just make us see.
This article was adapted from a talk given Oct. 4, 2002 at the Palvino Media Seminar Series at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, N.Y.
