Fair?

I am a journalist. As much as I might try to struggle and rage against it, that's what I do for a living and its likely I'll keep doing it for some time to come. Now, of course there are wide variations in the types of people that give themselves this title. There are the small town newspaper reporters, covering the township board meetings across the United States. And there are the courageous journalists traveling into war zones, or traveling with The President. I am somewhere in the middle. But, what we all have in common (at least at the beginning) is the desire to be fair. To tell a story the way its supposed to be told, and to resist letting our personal thoughts, beliefs and feelings get in the way. But today I found myself struggling to do the opposite.

What is "fair" about what is happening in Haiti? And how do I "fairly" tell the story to the viewers sitting at home, with the news on in the background as they sit down for dinner. I've been producing news for a long time. And - I hate to say it - disasters of this magnitude have happened a few times during my career. First the September 11th terrorist attacks, then the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, now Haiti. And - I hate to say it - it's going to happen again.

Oh, these are the times when a journalist can really shine! Right? At a time when the suffering, the chaos and the misery are just beyond words, most journalists will dig into their bag of cliches.

They'll spew out lines like:
"The devastation is unimaginable."
"The horror of the tragedy is undescribable"

There are the standard words:
"Devastation, horror, tragedy, chaos, grief and grieving"

And while some child is probably still sitting underneath tons of concrete, dust, wires, shit and piss watching his parents decompose; some pretty, twenty-something reporter with too much makeup and too much hair spray is literally singing the words into a microphone. You know - the way almost every TV reporter has to sing their lines: "The dev-uh-staaaay-shun is UN-imagine-a-buullll.

I struggle against cliches every day. And today I tried my best to be fair. Fair to the people who deserved to know just how awful the situation is in Haiti, and fair to the people who died, who are about to die, or who have watched their children, their parents or friends die.

I wrote something like this:

"Haiti was already one of the poor. But this earthquake has taken a country that was on its knees and knocked it to the ground. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands have died. Bodies are lying all over the place - some covered with sheets, others uncovered in plain sight. At night, little children go to sleep with a pile of rotting corpses only a few feet away. And with each hour that passes, the need for aid becomes more and more urgent."

Okay, I didn't resort to any of those loathsome cliches, and I think I brought enough graphic detail to the story to tell it fairly. But I'm not about to pat myself on the back for writing a paragraph while those people suffer. I haven't been there - never in my life. And I certainly have never seen or heard or smelled a disaster of those proportions. I wrote that from watching the video come down on feeds.

All day, I watch the images stream into our newsroom, and in a few days - like much of the world - I will become numb to them. Soon, the Haiti earthquake will get bumped down from the lead story to follow a school board meeting or an armed robbery. Soon it will take only 20 or 30 seconds of my newscast. And soon we'll forget. And soon, we'll start using words like "devastation" and "tragedy" to describe another story, somewhere else in the world.


Is that fair?