Call Them by Their True Names Read online

  There are stories beneath the stories and around the stories. The recent event on the surface is often merely the hood ornament on the mighty social engine that is a story driving the culture. We call those “dominant narratives” or “paradigms” or “memes” or “metaphors we live by” or “frameworks.” However we describe them, they are immensely powerful forces. And the dominant culture mostly goes about reinforcing the stories that are the pillars propping it up and that, too often, are also the bars of someone else’s cage. They are too often stories that should be broken, or are already broken and ruined and ruinous and way past their expiration date. They sit atop mountains of unexamined assumptions. Why does the media obediently hype terrorism, which kills so few people in the United States, and mostly trivialize domestic violence, which terrorizes millions of US women over extended periods and kills about a thousand a year? How do you break the story about what really threatens us and kills us?

  One thing to keep in mind is the life cycle and food chain of stories. The new stories, the stories that break the story, tend to emerge from the margins and the edges. Gandhi didn’t actually say, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” but that’s how activism generally works. And when activism wins, it’s because, at least in part, the story has become the new narrative, the story the mainstream accepts. Journalism plays a crucial role in this. You can see Black Lives Matter changing the story in our time by shedding light on the epidemic of police killings and the way those killings of young people of color exclude whole communities from their rights—including the right to be protected, not menaced, by public officials. You see how activists took this story known in the Black community, got it to catch fire on social media and get picked up by the news media, which gave extensive coverage to stories that might otherwise have been a little note in the back pages rather than hotly debated national news. We know their names now: Eric Garner, Mario Woods, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and so many others. The story has been carried from the edges to the center, and enough people who are not affected directly have gotten on board with those who are.

  Part of the job of a great storyteller is to examine the stories that underlie the story you’re assigned, maybe to make them visible, and sometimes to break us free of them. Break the story. Breaking is a creative act as much as making, in this kind of writing.

  Lots of writers have mooned around, saying that the world is made out of stories as though this is a lovely thing, but it’s only as lovely as the stories. There are stories that demonize female anger and Black anger and revere white male rage. There are stories about the inevitability of capitalism, stories that there are two sides to the reality of climate change, a host of stories that don’t get told because they rock the boat, discomfort the powerful, unsettle the status quo. Those are stories that will make you wildly unpopular with some people it’s great to be wildly unpopular with—and beloved by others it’s even greater to be beloved by.

  In 2005, a triple disaster struck New Orleans. The hurricane was the least of it; the failure of infrastructure and decades of bad planning and worse implementation made it an accurately predicted, largely manmade disaster, deepened by the failure of the social contract. Poor people were left behind to drown or suffer. Then the mass media showed up to criminalize people trying to survive and obsessed about the possibility that someone was stealing a TV set, making it clear that they considered protecting TV sets more important than rescuing dying grandmothers and traumatized toddlers. They fell back on a clutch of clichés that were already well-established when the 1906 earthquake happened in San Francisco.

  By luck of timing, I was fairly well equipped to be skeptical about the narratives of mobs of raping, looting, murdering humans gone savage. I had just completed some research and writing on the 1906 earthquake. Those urban legends weren’t true in 1906 and they weren’t true in 2005, even though the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, CBS, CNN, and many other media outlets reported them. “They tend to travel in herds and report the same story,” Adam Hochschild recently said of journalists in the Spanish Civil War.

  For the tenth anniversary of the manmade catastrophe called Katrina, I wrote:

  A vast population of mostly African American New Orleanians was trapped on rooftops, elevated freeways, and in the Convention Center and Superdome in the sweltering 80 percent underwater city, demonized by government and mainstream media as too savage and dangerous to rescue or allow to leave the city. Would-be rescuers from outside were turned back by officials, as were people attempting to flee from inside. New Orleans had, at the hand of malevolent authorities, become a prison. Given how the people of Baltimore were demonized for rising up last April [2015], and how chain stores and a predatory check-cashing outlet suddenly became the holiest of holy sites for many Americans, it’s easy to imagine another disaster like it.

  The unindicted coconspirator in the dehumanization, imprisonment, and death of so many people, mostly African Americans, many of them elderly, in New Orleans was and is the mainstream media. They fell back on the usual disaster stories about looting, raping, marauding hordes, eager to demonize Black people as monsters who were enemies rather than as the vulnerable, needy victims of a catastrophe. They invented new stories that turned out to be entirely baseless about people shooting at helicopters and great piles of corpses from imaginary bloodbaths in the Superdome.

  To me, those were broken stories, or stories that needed to be broken. I realized, as I kept returning to New Orleans after Katrina, that there had in fact been horrific crimes, and the armies of reporters swamping the city had utterly avoided them or been unable to see them. These were the crimes not of the underclass against the status quo, but of the status quo against the underclass: killings by police and crimes by white vigilantes. I gathered up sources and contacts, photographs and leads, scraps that had been hidden in plain sight, and gave them over to a truly great investigative journalist, A. C. Thompson, who took the material and ran with it. He originated other stories when he got to New Orleans, notably on the police murder of Henry Glover, an unarmed Black man shot in the back. That story sent policemen to prison, something that rarely happens. I did some more reporting myself and wrote a book about how people actually behave in disaster, A Paradise Built in Hell.

  At some point in this process, I was leaving a radio station, where I’d been talking about what really happened in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. I turned on my own car radio to hear A. C. talking about the same thing on another station. Sitting there, I thought: we actually broke that story, turned the official version inside out and upside down. The history people remembered ten years later was not the story the mainstream media used to smear poor Black people, and human nature generally, in 2005. We didn’t do it alone, of course. Breaking a story is usually a prolonged, collaborative process. It usually begins with activists, witnesses, whistleblowers, and with victims, the people affected, the people on the front lines, the people to whom the story happened. The next step is often carried out by people with storytelling powers who are willing to listen. No journalist is the first person to know anything, if you’re reporting on what happened to another person, though, you might be the first person to listen. It’s always someone else’s story first, and it never stops being their story, either, no matter how well you tell it, how widely you spread it.

  In March 2016, one of the great journalists of our time, Ben Bagdikian, died. He broke the story on the tremendous threat to democracy posed by media monopolies, back when I was his student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Long before that, he was the journalist Daniel Ellsberg trusted to receive the Pentagon Papers, which exposed four presidents’ lies about the war in Vietnam and broke the story about the war. I was lucky to be in his class on ethics, where he taught us, “You can’t be objective, but you can be fair.” Objective is a fiction that there is some neutral ground, some political no man’s land you can hang out in, y
ou and the mainstream media. Even what you deem worthy to report and whom you quote is a political decision. We tend to treat people on the fringe as ideologues and those in the center as neutral, as though the decision not to own a car is political and the decision to own one is not, as though to support a war is neutral and to oppose it is not. There is no apolitical, no sidelines, no neutral ground; we’re all engaged.

  “Advocacy journalism” is often used as an incriminating term, but almost any good exposé is advocacy. If you’re exposing a president’s lies, as Bagdikian and Ellsberg did, you probably think presidents shouldn’t lie; if you’re exposing a corporation’s contamination of the water table—by fracking, say—you’re probably not in favor of poisoning, or at least you’re in favor of people knowing. It’s surprising how many people will defend poisoning people, animals, and places, usually by denying that poison is poisonous or that we have a right to know what toxins are out there. This makes being against poisoning a controversial position at times.

  The writer’s job is not to look through the window someone else built, but to step outside, to question the framework, or to dismantle the house and free what’s inside, all in service of making visible what was locked out of the view. News journalism focuses on what changed yesterday rather than asking what are the underlying forces and who are the unseen beneficiaries of this moment’s status quo. A policeman shoots a Black person: What do you need to know, beyond the specifics, to understand the incident, in terms of how often this happens, or how it affects communities and individuals in the long term, or what the usual justifications are? This is why you need to know your history, even if you’re a journalist rather than a historian. You need to know the patterns to see how people are fitting the jumble of facts into what they already have: selecting, misreading, distorting, excluding, embroidering, distributing empathy here but not there, remembering this echo or forgetting that precedent.

  Some of the stories we need to break are not exceptional events, they’re the ugly wallpaper of our everyday lives. For example, there’s a widespread belief that women lie about being raped, not a few women, not an anomalous woman, but women in general. This framework comes from the assumption that reliability and credibility are as natural to men as mendacity and vindictiveness are to women. In other words, feminists just made it all up, because otherwise we’d have to question a really big story whose nickname is patriarchy. But the data confirms that people who come forward about being raped are, overall, telling the truth (and that rapists tend to lie, a lot). Many people have gotten on board with the data, many have not, and so behind every report on a sexual assault is a battle over the terms in which we tell, in what we believe about gender and violence.

  Every bad story is a prison; breaking the story breaks someone out of prison. It’s liberation work. It matters. It changes the world. Percy Bysshe Shelley famously noted that poets are the true legislators of the world; journalists are the story-breakers whose work often changes the belief systems that then drive legislative and institutional change. It’s powerful, honorable, profoundly necessary work when it’s done with passion and independence and guts. What made Spotlight such a great movie was not that it showed how a team of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe broke a story about widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests. It was that the film also showed how the Globe had long turned away from breaking the story because it meant shattering comfortable relationships and beliefs.

  I think of the mainstream media as having not so much a rightwing or leftwing bias but a status quo bias, a tendency to believe people in authority, to trust institutions and corporations and the rich and powerful and pretty much any self-satisfied white man in a suit; to let people who have been proven to tell lies tell more lies that get reported without questioning; to move forward on cultural assumptions that are readily disproven; and to devalue nearly all outsiders, whether they’re discredited or mocked or just ignored. Thus the smoothing over of the transformation of our economy into something far more inequitable over the past third of a century; thus the many major media outlets that went along with the pretense that Iraq had something to do with Al Qaeda and 9/11; thus the long, craven pretense that climate denial funded by fossil fuel corporations represented a legitimate position to be given equal coverage with the consensus of the great majority of qualified scientists.

  For journalists and for human beings generally, the elephant in the room has been there for a long time. It’s not even the elephant: the elephant in the room is the room itself, the biosphere in which all life currently known to exist in the universe is enclosed, and on which it all depends, the biosphere now devastated by climate change, with far more change to come. The scale is not like anything human beings have faced and journalists have reported on, except perhaps the threat of all-out nuclear war—and that was something that might happen, not something that is happening. Climate change is here, and it is changing everything. It is bigger than anything else, because it is everything, for the imaginable future.

  Inhabited parts of the earth will become uninhabitable; crop failures are rising, and they create famine, climate refugees, and conflict (climate played a role in the Syrian civil war); the Greenland ice sheet is melting in collapses and torrents; the Western Antarctic ice sheet is also melting far faster than predicted by models a few years ago; sea levels will rise so dramatically by the end of this century that every world atlas will be obsolete and we will have entirely new coastlines in the low-lying places; much of New York City is likely to be doomed in the long run, as is a lot of Bangladesh, Egypt, and Vietnam, along with southern Florida and other parts of the Atlantic seaboard; the oceans are turning into acid baths; the coral reefs that serve as nurseries for fish that feed a significant portion of the earth’s human beings are dying rapidly; extinction is accelerating; and turbulent weather is going to be the new normal, producing catastrophes like the spring 2016 mega-fire in Alberta, the biggest disaster in Canadian history (one that was, incidentally, appallingly underreported in the United States), or 2017’s catastrophic fires and hurricanes.

  All this news has a hard time competing with whatever fleeting human drama best sows righteous indignation and harvests clicks. This is partly the failure of human nature, but partly the failure of the media to put things in perspective and to report on the scale and menace of climate change’s impact—and on the shrinking option to minimize rather than maximize it. The stories that we are destroying our home, mostly by slow-moving, indirect, complex means, are largely overlooked and underplayed. Since it’s an ongoing process instead of something that erupted yesterday, it’s hard to get coverage at all, even when it’s “normal news”: scandals, lies, and money, as with the concealment by Exxon and other fossil fuel corporations of their awareness of climate change before it was widely reported on or recognized. The magnificent global climate movement and the remarkably swift and effective energy transitions under way are described in fragments when they’re discussed at all.

  Future generations are going to curse most of us for distracting ourselves with trivialities as the planet burned. Journalists are in a pivotal place when it comes to the possibilities and the responsibilities in this crisis. We, the makers and breakers of stories, are tremendously powerful.

  So please, break the story.

  * * *

  5. This is a revised version of a commencement speech at my alma mater, the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

  Hope in Grief

  (2018)

  I find great hope and encouragement in the anxiety, fury, and grief of my fellow residents of the United States. It’s not that I’m eager to see people suffer but that I’m relieved that so many are so far from indifferent. I feared after the election that those of us who are not directly targeted would do what people have often done during despotic regimes: withdraw into private life, wait it out, take care of themselves and no one else.

  Something else happened instead.
>
  The distress is profound. People report deep emotional distress and trouble sleeping, anxiety, preoccupation, rage, rage fatigue, misery, fear, dread, and other emotions—and an obsessive preoccupation with the news. Amy Siskind, a former Wall Street executive, has focused full time on documenting the slide toward authoritarianism with a weekly list of the Trump Administration’s transgressive and disturbing actions and statements. She reported in November that she had started wearing a mouth guard at night because she was clenching her jaw in her sleep and had cracked a tooth. An art teacher tells me, “The stress of living in a society that is in very real danger of collapsing into chaos and potential widespread violence is definitely affecting me physically. I feel like I have a mild case of some flu. My thoughts are foggy with heartache. Something tells me that millions of people are feeling this way.”

  People care. Not everyone is engaged, and of course about a third of the country still supports Trump and wants to return to a semi-imaginary America when white men controlled everything, women were silent, nonwhite people were subservient, heterosexuality was obligatory, and environmental destruction was unregulated. But Gloria Steinem, the eighty-three-year-old feminist and activist, said at an event earlier this year in San Francisco that she has never seen the level of engagement across the country, not in the 1960s, not ever, that she sees around her now. What I see in many lives around me is a passionate concern about principles, about honor, about the vulnerable, about the future, about the rule of law, about the integrity of the institutions on which the nation depends.

  Which is to say, they are, we are, idealists. We are public-minded. We are engaged members of society. This goes against what we in the US have been told in every possible way all our lives, and what those of you elsewhere who also live under capitalism, social Darwinism, and what maybe we could call Freudianism have been told: that a human being is a selfish animal concerned with meeting its own bodily and emotional and material needs and perhaps perpetuating its genes, that our desires are private and personal. Indeed, during the rise of corporate globalization and the transnational anti-globalization movement, I often noted that before you privatized a bank or a railroad you had to privatize imaginations and convince people that we do not have anything in common with each other that matters; that we owe each other nothing; that our lives are ideally lived out in domestic and personal arenas; that we are consumers, not citizens; that there is no reason we should want to live in public or participate in public life. It has worked in many ways. We are told over and over that the public sphere is superfluous, messy, unpleasant, dangerous, not where our pleasures and purpose are located, and Silicon Valley has worked hard to profit off this point of view.