Reporting between the lines

I haven't done any reporting in a year now. I'm concentrating on finishing my thesis and working as a teaching assistant for an anthropology class. I'm really enjoying the teaching but I'm still struggling with how to convey the idea of a world view, how something that seems strange or even repulsive to us can make perfect sense in a different culture. I still get "I can't believe people do that in this day and age" in their essays. And I don't think journalism as it exists today is helping. Most international reporting does an excellent job of bringing us the facts, but it doesn't give any sense of what it is like to live with those facts. Perhaps it comes down to how you tell your stories. If so, our best hope for new kinds of stories is probably online. Here's the text of a talk I gave last year about just that subject.

Reporting between the lines

I'd like to start out in the centre of Mexico City. You can feel the weight of 20 million people bearing down on you. Its a jumble of traffic and pedestrians criss-crossing, competing to get to where they need to go. It is chaotic. Aggressive. Dog-eat-dog.

Or so I thought...

The sidewalks are lined with street stalls, the sellers bark in your ears - "tacos," "CDs" - and there I was forcing my way past them without even glancing, when I spotted something I wanted to buy in one of the stalls. Some kind of trinket, a pocket diary, I think. There was no seller at the stall, but a woman at the next one over said "she'll be here in a minute."

“I really only have a minute,” I thought, but I waited. I was about to leave when another seller called out over the sound of cars. "There she is!" I could see a young girl on the other side of the street, picking her way through nine lanes of traffic towards us. Now I was obliged to stay. I sighed. "Just about there," a taco seller said to me, eyeing my impatience.

Finally the girl arrived. She must have been about twelve, a young indigenous girl. A cheap bangle in her hair. A ragged black cardigan. I paid her a dollar for the diary and moved on, and as I did I realized that all the other sellers were smiling at me. They were looking out for the girl, a kindly community of guardians. I felt foolish, like I didn't deserve the smiles. Here I was, thinking I was in command of all the facts about this place – the level of noise, density of crowd, gruffness of voices – and yet I knew nothing about it. That is, I knew nothing about what it was like, really like, to be one of these people.

That distinction is what I'd like to talk about tonight. Journalists working overseas spend a lot of their time reporting on the visible tangible facts of faraway places. They don't get much opportunity to report on the essence, the feeling, the understanding of the people themselves, as they see things. To do what I call “reporting between the lines.” But I think in a world where people from different places are rubbing shoulders more and more, this kind of reporting is going to be increasingly necessary.

Reporters like to say they tell stories. “Oh, that's a good story,” they say when they get a lead. Or... “I'm working on this story...” as a conversation starter. More glibly: “I'm a storyteller.”

“My job is easy,” bluffs one reporter that I know. “All I do is go out and talk to people, then come back and tell their stories.”

Right. But the stories he tells, that is, the beginning, the middle, the crisis, the ending, happy or otherwise, the way it unfolds and holds you, has already been written, back home, by editors, by the audience and what they expect from the new. They, we, need familiar heroes and villains, measurable success or failure, a conflict, a resolution. Refugees should be bedraggled, drug traffickers grizzled, border towns dusty. And while it is important for foreign reporters to be familiar with the place they are reporting on, I would argue it is often more important that they are familiar with their audience. Many press agencies rotate correspondents from bureau to bureau so they don't "go native." When I lived in Mexico, I wondered, "why do I have this great job, paying me in US dollars, and not some local journalist who happens to speak English?"

Because, of course, my editors could count on me thinking like them.

But most journalists know, too, that the archetypes we seek rarely exist in their pure form. Indigenous people might be a shade too white. Crime victims might not be innocent angels. War victims might not sob enough as they tell their stories. Peasants might have cell phones that go off in the middle of an interview, or picturesque mud huts stuffed to the gills with a 500W entertainment system.

Here's an example of what I mean.

In Bogota, I visited an NGO which dispensed aid and counselling to internal refugees, those who flee violence within their own country. On tape, for me, they told harrowing stories of death or escape. They even cried a little... which always makes for great tape. As one editor wrote to me once: “Aren't you like, on the outside all sympathetic and stuff and inside thinking 'Yes!'”

But when the recorder was off, they sounded more like excited school children, members of an exclusive club, trying to outdo each other with tales of the atrocities they had witnessed, some too stomach churning to recount now. "That's nothing,” they'd say, “in my village the paramilitaries... etc". At the office of the NGO, they had all been given information on their rights as refugees, printed information that came in folders which must have been donated by a local business. These were children's folders, with pictures of kids movies. Some had Cars. Others Buzz Lightyear. But one guy got a Barbie folder, and the others teased him mercilessly. "Oh, if anyone could see us now," said one woman, tears of laughter streaming down her face, "they'd never believe we were refugees!"

Quite true. And I never reported it. Imagine listening to a radio documentary, and hearing the refugees laughing. It would be like throwing in an essay on the mating habits of wolves into the middle of Little Red Riding Hood. But now... imagine if I had included it. The story would have been less complete, less conclusive. It would have added nothing to our store of information about the political and human situation in war-torn Colombia. But it would have told the story of being a refugee from the point of view of the refugee, not what we expect them to be like. And I think there is immense value in that.

I never saw the value until I returned to Canada after 15 years living in Mexico. I still can't quite put it into words, but I laboured, and still do, under a kind of disconnect, a lack of understanding between myself and my environment. People here seemed to take it for granted that the world works a certain way when I felt, from visceral experience, that it didn't always work that way. But I had no language to explain it. For my wife, still learning English, the adaptation was even harder. For our many immigrant friends, with no prior point of contact with Canada, it has been painful. They find that although the media has done well to bring Canadians many facts about the world, Canadians still don't really get it. A Saudi student recently told me how he tires of having to explain that he doesn't have an oil well in his backyard. An Iranian friend wonders why she has to apologise constantly for her nationality, or take pains to explain that her government doesn't speak for her. I asked a Colombian friend, who works in a government agency created to promote awareness about immigrants, how he gets along with his Canadian bosses and coworkers. He sighed: "They don't understand us. It's like...it's like... " He struggled to find the words, and ended only in silence. It worries me that as Canada goes around the world signing free trade agreements, distributing aid and sending troops, that there is still silence between us and the countries with which we are engaging. They at least have North American movies and TV programs they can watch to get some idea of our way of thinking... or, anyway, the cliches that move us. But when was the last time we watched a Saudi, Iranian or Colombian movie?

We can fill this silence, though. We can disrupt the comfortable patterns of thought that we have fallen into and get a glimpse, however small, of new ways of thinking about the world. And we don't need to depend on costly mainstream media to do it either. We are watching today, growing up around the mainstream media, like moss on a wall, a wealth of communications technologies - blogs, Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, Youtube, community radio, activist journalism, Skype, live streaming, Flickr. Yes, they are the subject of intense, sometimes bitter debate about their lack of credibility, objectivity, reliability. Yes, many of the millions of sources of online information do lack credibility, objectivity reliability. But I think the debate about these concerns misses an important point. What new media offers is new ways of reporting on the world, new ways of experiencing the events in the news. Check out Meedan.net, a discussion forum translated between English and Arabic that claims to be "citizen diplomacy" between the West and the Middle East. Check out Global Voices. You'll hear of events you never imagined around the world. You'll have to struggle to fit them into your world view. You will even have to look up where they are happening on Google Maps. But these stories are written by real, living breathing people for other living breathing people... just like you.

“Boy, they sure are killing a lot of Canadians down there.” I get that a lot from people whose only experience of Mexico are the beaches and the news reports of tourists targeted by crime. I suggest they check out Twitter. This feed, from a middle class university student in the Mexican city of Monterrey, came in just a few night ago, while I was writing this talk:

‣ Its the second time today that I feel like a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

‣ Ha, ha, ha. Tonight I'm going to have panela cheese for supper and I'll be happy.

‣ Gunshots! Three minutes ago, I could hear them outside my house, but I hope they are far away.

‣ Its Rio Nazas. About two blocks away.

‣ My dad was coming home but I warned him off.

‣ (In reply to someone) Yes, she knows and stays away from the window like I taught her.

‣ (A series of retweets on the shoutout and thanks for messages of support from friends)

‣ I'm fucking tired of living like this.

‣ (In reply to someone). No. Thank goodness we didn't go. We'd be face down in the dirt right now.

‣ (Another reply) Yes, Rocco. It's over. But (unhappy face symbol.)

‣ My dad is home.

‣ I want a dress like the chick in E Entertainment News.

‣ Good night everyone and have a great Thursday.

This feed sent more shivers down my spine than all the 30 second clips of body bags on the nightly news.

I don't have a panacea for cross-cultural understanding, or a neat definition of what I am calling “reporting between the lines.” I think it must be subjective, which means that it is almost by definition unprofessional. It may be inconclusive, raise more questions than it answers, and disagree with us. It will be riddled with perspective and point-of-view. I think in some cases it won't resemble reporting at all. But it is here to stay, and whether or not it is the best way to know what is going somewhere else, I think it might be our best hope for understanding what it is like to be somewhere else.