Sunday September 18, 2022

Professionalism, generally, means that you do your job without letting your personal preferences interfere.

            So a lawyer sets aside her personal loathing of a long-term criminal to defend him, to the best of her ability.

            An NHL hockey player plays his best, regardless of what city he’s traded to. 

            And a doctor treats a gang member or a sex worker without letting her own distaste for their lifestyles affect her diagnosis and treatment.

            In the same way, I have always assumed, professional journalists should deliver the facts impartially, without letting their own political biases colour their reporting.

            Fox News blew that principle into outer space. But I shouldn’t suggest that Fox did it alone. Ever since the rise of newspaper empires a century ago, newspapers have been known to have their own bias. In the U.S., Republican or Democratic. In Canada, liberal or conservative. 

            Talk radio made no attempt to conceal the host’s prejudices. Fox News took talk-radio to an extreme. 

            Alternative news networks on the internet claim to be free of the influence of corporate owners and advertisers. But they have their own biases. One non-profit service rants about the supposed misdeeds of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, while totally ignoring similar  allegations against Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law. Another does the exact opposite. 

Selective details

            In fact, journalists are never totally unbiased. When we do interviews, when we do research, we pick and choose the quotes, the incidents, the stories, that we use. They serve as samples that represent the whole story, as we see it. 

            Ideally, they point to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

            But, I wonder, is professionalism limited to just reporting accurately? 

            Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones spent ten years asserting -- over and over, on TV, in newspapers, on social media -- that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary was a hoax, the bereaved parents merely actors. 

            A Texas court recently sentenced Jones to pay $45 million damages to the parents of a boy killed at Sandy Hook. 

            Was it enough for journalists to report his claims accurately? Should they have challenged his “facts”? Or ignored him completely?

Tough questions

            A long time ago, when the association now known as Editors Canada was still in its infancy, we held a workshop on professionalism.

            The executive posed a hypothetical question: “If you were asked to edit Hitler’s Mein Kampf, what would you do?”

            The discussion, as you might guess, was lively. Even vehement. Editors tend to be hyper-rational, most of the time.  But several of the editors were Jewish. Their families had suffered from Hitler’s regime. They could not be academically dispassionate.

            The viewpoints broke down, as I recall it, into four general responses. 

·      One, refuse to touch the job at all. 

·      Two, accept the job but sabotage it. 

·      Three, accept the job and correct grammatical defects, but nothing more.

·      Four, accept the job and make the book as powerful and persuasive as possible.

            We never achieved any consensus.

            All four are legitimate responses. Although theoretically, only the fourth would qualify as impartial professionalism. It’s not up to an editor – or a doctor, or an engineer, or a lawyer – to act as judge or jury.

            I have, at various times, taken all four of those options.

            I have rejected jobs and manuscripts that I didn’t want to be associated with. I consider that the most honourable option.

            I have accepted assignments but then amended the text until it said something different from what the author originally intended. (No, I’m not proud of having done it. I argue that I had no choice; I was following orders. Even as I recognize that Hitler’s minions used the same excuse.) 

            I have accepted jobs where I did as little as possible to alter the text itself. The content was the author’s responsibility. I merely tidied minor flaws – spelling, punctuation, grammar -- that might have embarrassed the author if published as is.

            But mostly, I hope, I have tried to make the finished product as good as possible. Even if I didn’t always agree with the author’s viewpoint. 

            I thought that was being professional.

            Today, years later, I wonder if I’ve had a distorted perspective. 

            Are a doctor’s medical skills entirely divorced from a doctor’s personal convictions?

            Should a lawyer have to defend a client she knows has committed atrocities?

            Is it enough for journalists to report without distortion what they know to be falsehoods? Or do they also have a professional obligation to challenge lies?

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Copyright © 2022 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.

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Your turn

Louise Burton had a personal connection to the:tragedy in the James Smith Cree nation: “I spent 5 years in Melfort Sask which isn't very far from James Smith Cree. They had a great Sports Day in the summer with ball tournaments, chariot and chuckwagon pony racing, and lots of food!  The terrible tragedy they have had and will be recovering from for a long time is really a serious reminder of the generational trauma that the past has imposed on them..May they find some peace and hope for the future as they use their own ceremonial resources to aid their healing. It is very sad and I pray for them -- all of them, including the two young men who caused so much violence.

Steve Roney also addressed the issue of collective grief: “I agree that ritual is the best way to manage grief. More broadly, art is; ritual is the ultimate art. Wordsworth said poetry was ‘emotion recollected in tranquility.’ I think he was a little off: art is emotion sublimated to tranquility. 

            “This is why the finest art emerges in times of turmoil, and the greatest artists have lived lives of suffering. You must have lived, to sing the blues.

            “Ritual and religion is the highest expression of art: it is the ultimate multimedia. It fills the universe; it makes art of one’s life.”

And Tom Watson noted, “Well articulated thoughts about collective grief, Jim. Thanks.”

On the subject of collective grief, Isabel Gibson noted that last Sunday was “also the 21st anniversary of 9-11 -- another occasion for community-level and even national-level grieving, as well as the private grief of those directly affected. America has handled that grief with words and rituals and monuments and charities dedicated to helping the survivors.

            “But 24 Canadians were also killed that day and, as far as I know, we've had precious little recognition of that fact, and almost no community rituals. Perhaps they weren't part of an identifiable community -- and merely being Canadian wasn't enough to trigger the response.

            “It's a big gap -- not having religious or community rituals in the face of death.”

The rest of the letters about last week’s column looked more at grief in general. 

Louise Miles lost her husband Fred during the Covid lockdown: “I too still struggle with grief and all that it entails. A quote I like .. ‘One does not know the power of grief until the loss of love’ .... brings solace.”

Doug Giles: I see you once put a lot of faith in Kubler Ross' On Death and Dying where she describes the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, & acceptance).  It was required reading when I was at seminary.

 “A friend worked her way through all the levels of CPE and became an instructor.  She was hired as a chaplain at Vancouver General Hospital.  She said that Kubler Ross was helpful but not nearly enough complete.  For one thing, Ross' five stages didn't necessarily occur in any particular order and some didn't happen at all.  Unfortunately my friend developed breast cancer.  As often happens during chemo she lost her hair. Her way of coping with that was to have a tattoo of a maze tattooed on her head.

The subject of grief hit close to home for June Blau: “ One month ago, his church, work, neighbourhood & extended family communities bade farewell to my husband who had died a week earlier.  The immediate family had said our private goodbyes a couple of days earlier at his burial. 

            “Grieving, for me, has been a ‘mulligan stew’ of gratitudes:  for 60 years of a very special companion, who had 85 y. of a good life & a ‘good death’.  I cannot grieve for him… he had the best!  And my gratitude for our awesome life together, our wonderful daughters & their families, our comfortable home, the love & support of church & community, makes it impossible for me to ‘grieve’ for myself… yet. I may get there at some point. 

            “Yes, the days, and especially the evenings, can be long & lonely.  And I miss that special companionship every day, but I had it for 60 y. & remind myself that many never have what I have had.”

Arleen Simmonds: “As another bereaved parent who has volunteered in a bereaved parents support group, your message has given me a lot to think about. Yes, we come from an individual perspective as all bereaved parents do. It’s all that can be coped with at that time. This global and community grieving of this week is very much a communal experience and we needed to share our grief. I appreciate what you have written here and I will take the time needed to reflect on your wise words.”

Margaret Tribe looked for something good: “Something that moved and impressed me was hearing that a family member of one of the murder victims put his arm around the widow of one of the suspects, and spoke of forgiveness and healing, and getting through the trauma together. The world could learn a big lesson here.”

Clare Neufeld: “Mass shootings, the bus crash near Humboldt, SK, George Floyd, etc., trigger a shared grief, not unlike, yet always unique from the current grief of James Smith Cree Nation -- acknowledged,  recognized and expressed by Queen Elizabeth II, mere days prior to her own departure, which triggered another nuanced grief, world-wide, and at home.”

Nenke Jongkind wanted to follow-up on “Tom Watson’s letter (last week:JT) about the motion passed in 1988, which had some shortcomings. It only mentioned sexual orientation. I thought it needed to be more inclusive and list other realities one cannot do anything about, such as baldness, wearing glasses, hearing aids, limping, etc. I also hoped that on the Sunday morning after General Council, attendees in their home congregations would all ‘come out’ of their closets at the same time. 

            “It couldn’t happen of course.”

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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PROMOTION STUFF…

To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)

            Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.

            I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/

            Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)

ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE

            The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns