Are You Really Satisfied With That?

They've been saying -- and acting on what they've been saying -- that photojournalism as a specialty is doomed. With smart phones and easy-to-use point-and-shoot cameras producing high quality photos and videos, "anyone can be a photographer." As I have said before: Wrong.

Here's why: It all hinges on what you mean by "high quality." Much as when the camera companies and tech-heads go on about megapixels and bit rates (usually to get you to buy the newest, hottest, most fabulously expensive thing) the technical image quality just gets better and better, but the quality of the picture itself still depends on the photographer.

For example, Time photographers were recently given iPhone 6's to make pictures during news events, and they made some amazing images. But what does that mean? If you ask me, it means amazing photographers make amazing images no matter what the gear.

It reminds me of a story a friend told me about a seminar led by a famous landscape photographer. The speaker was known for lush images shot using giant view cameras and huge, 8x10 negatives. After a slide show and speech, he took questions, one of which was inevitably what gear he used. He delineated the maker of his equipment and lenses, etc., and then added, "But these slides I just shot were made with one of those little plastic cameras they send you as a gift when you subscribe to a magazine." (This was some decades ago, when cheap plastic film cameras were actually considered a worthless gift rather than the tool of deep, meaningful art school students.)

So the question we the consumers need to ask is this: Are we willing to be satisfied with some grab shot of a news event taken by a bystander with his cell phone? It does show what happened ... but it does little else. And you had better not be expecting the craft of Journalism to ensure you get something better, because the craft of Journalism in the end works for a bunch of guys who are less interested in craft, journalism, or quality than they are in making money. Let's face it: The Paley's and Sulzberger's and Graham's and Luce's seem like noble icons only through the mists of time; none of them took a vow of poverty. So it's up to us, the consumers, to show we will buy good stuff and not buy crap.

But if you're satisfied with the crappy photography ...

Today's Reading

Today's Gospel Reading, in part ...

Then he sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them,

“If anyone wishes to be first,

he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” 

From Mark, Chapter 9. 

Before this, the disciples are confused about Jesus' lesson, and discuss it among themselves. They are afraid to ask Him what it means, however, and try to figure it out among themselves. Rather than puzzling out the message (or doing the obvious, and simply asking for guidance), they eventually fall into an argument over who is the best disciple. Typical.

Catching them at this, Jesus calls them together, and says the above. 

So is this coincidence? How is it that the reading seems most grandly applicable in a time of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and others who feel they should naturally inherit the earth?

Let us move on to what comes next ...

Taking a child, he placed it in the their midst,

and putting his arms around it, he said to them,

“Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me;

and whoever receives me,

receives not me but the One who sent me.”

One can only think of the Syrian children dead on the beach, the crowds of youngsters struggling with their parents through Southern Europe to find safety. Are we ready to receive them?

Remember: these readings were chosen at least a year ago, if not longer. How is it they are so applicable now?

Aftermath

"The killings appear to have been skillfully engineered for maximum distribution, and to sow maximum dread, over Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones." This is could be one of the very stupidest things I have read in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, though I am sure I shall see much more ... and far more stupid.

The author, who specializes in writing about tech for The New York Times, engages in a rumination on the rapid spreading of information via social media in our age, and speculates on how "as a newshound," the killer anticipated and exploited this. What crap.

The killer was a 41-year-old, worked in the media, and lived his life -- like his contemporaries and others in the business -- online. How else would one communicate with the world? Envisioning his last-minute posting and videoing of his act as some devious scheme gives him far too much credit. While making a video of a killing is bizarre (though no more bizarre than having a range of delusional grievances that drive one to murder), in a social media-saturated world it means no more than posting a video of any other important life moment.

By no means am I saying, as has become obvious, that he wasn't contemplating and planning his actions for some time. He rented his getaway car weeks before, bought his gun and plenty of ammunition (But for what? No one seems to have an comprehensive, rational answer for that, nor in my opinion will they), and packed an assortment of items to aid in an escape (like a wig, a hat, and several license plates), not to mention his many and various online actions, but my point is that there is not the organized, devious, and clever planning that the writer describes. Vester Lee Flanagan showed the organizational skills of an eight-year-old packing to run away from home, not those of some criminal mastermind.

In the search for clarity, I turned to a friend who both practices and teaches clinical psychology. He has posted a very useful excerpt/summary of an excellent piece that drives directly to the sort of craziness that drove Flanagan to murder.

Put succinctly, he was an "Injustice Collector," the most recent in a line of such, and what may seem a carefully structured method is just an extended collection of deluded, angry complaints and intentions. "Whatever you do, don't cherry-pick quotes from a collector and believe it explains him," Dave Cullen writes. "They tend to state their motives emphatically, but they are mostly outbursts."

Now I should probably give the poor fellow at The New York Times a break. We all approach things from our own perspectives, and when confronted with something so outside of our experience and worldview, something so bizarre and alien as to be positively surreal, we try to box it up and organize so we can understand it. He writes about technology and the internet, and that's how he saw it. But like so many bright, deeply entrenched experts, particularly (and sadly) in journalism, he's lost the path in the depths of his expertise.

In my case, these recent, shocking, hopefully (though sadly not really) unique events have forced upon me, at least, a greater understanding of my role as a part of a news story.

As I said in my last posting, in the journalism business one must go into a disassociated state when dealing with the shocking, the catastrophic, the unimaginably sad. If you don't separate yourself from the reality of it all, you run the risk of being overwhelmed. Sometimes, this attitude can be quite callous and cynical; I refer to it as "telling dead baby jokes."

This is quite easy to do when the people involved literally have nothing to do with you. One is and rightly should be shocked by pictures of drowned children who died trying to flee war and privation, only seeking the most basic of life's needs: safety. But it's a Syrian child, half a world away in Turkey. It's easy to see that as tragic, but nothing to do with me, not in a direct sense.

Alison and Adam were people I knew. Their loved ones are people I know, and people I have had direct interaction with since the killings. They are people I want to help, to be gentle with. I need to cling to the visceral reactions I have to the events, and most important keep fresh that feeling, that moment of hesitation I experience when I contemplate using this picture or that description, fearing how cruelly sad or shocking it might be to my friends and their families. Every death, every horrible news story carries with it this entourage of secondary victims, and as I proceed to trundle through my work in the usual way, I've got to remember that for them this is a uniquely massive event. It may be just another story to me, but it is the central tragedy of their lives for them.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” 

― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

Not Again ...

After careers as a media figure, journalist, businesswoman, mother, and charity executive, Chelsea Clinton has decided now that she is also an author ... and the establishment that adores her and her parents continues to act as enablers.

If the above offends you, allow me to apologize in advance for indelicacy, but Chelsea's easy stroll through careers in which talented others have struggled to advance has always irked me and does so even more with each step. She may be very clever and even very appealing (though I have yet to be presented with any serious evidence of either), but apparently she is not a talented writer.

"Where she succeeds is in making even the knottiest issues seem accessible to a bright seventh grader," New York Times reviewer Maria Russo starts in a hopeful fashion. "In fact, she writes in a style that would seem perfectly at home in a stack of middle-school term papers. ('In my lifetime, a number of countries across the world granted women the right to vote for the first time. Having the right to vote is often only a first step. Being able to safely exercise that right is often harder, even dangerous for some women ... and men alike. In many countries where women are denied a meaningful right to vote, men are too. To be clear, that shared inequality and lack of rights is nothing to celebrate.') There are abundant references to what she has already told us, or will tell us later, a tic teachers seem to love, but alas, no one else." And there we have the damnation by faint praise.

So, aside from the name "Clinton," how has she come to deserve the opportunity to lecture the youth of America for 400 pages? (And seriously, Four. Hundred. Pages. What young person is going to read this? And couldn't their time be more valuably spent reading, I don't know, any well established author on poverty and economics? Surely Steinbeck and Ellison are still in print. Hell, make a run at the other sections The New York Times; there you'll find real journalists who actually know how to write like grown ups.)

So, the review concludes, what is this massive doorstop for? "On the evidence of 'It’s Your World,' Clinton feels a lot for other people. [Oh Dear God] But it mainly seems as if she feels sorry for them, and that’s ultimately where 'It’s Your World' reaches its limits. This is not a book destined to influence hearts and minds in the way 'I Am Malala' [A book by a young woman who has actually done something] has done — by helping children to understand the slow way change can happen and to truly feel a part of that magic."

I wonder what identity she'll be offered an easy, effort-free pathway to next ...

Alison and Adam

What hangs with me, some two days after the killings of WDBJ's Alison Parker and Adam Ward, is the sound of her screams. It wasn't the long, horror movie scream, but a series of short screams. It was the sound of being startled and frightened, like when someone jumps out at a girl in a house of horror and shouts: "Boo!" At the time, I took it as a good sign: as long as she was screaming, she was alive. I am used to the sound of gunshots on TV (I edit the network footage, full of the violence of the world, every morning), but those half-dozen or so screams were both familiar and troubling, especially now that I know what they mean. It inhabits my mind.

However, to be honest, I must note that I didn't know any of the characters well. Adam was working in production when I was at WDBJ, running the in-studio camera, getting promoted to the actual Photojournalist job only as I was leaving. Both Alison and their killer were hired after I left. It is a small world we work in, and even smaller in a relatively tiny city like Roanoke, and so we run into each other often on the streets and generally get along amiably. But I don't want to create the illusion that they were some great friends of mine.

If you want a personal connection, there is the fact that I held that very job -- the morning field reporter's photographer -- for a year or so before moving over to do Fox's morning show. I think it was Adam who replaced me. But I have to say, this in no way troubles me. I didn't have to deal with the workplace annoyance that the killer was (rather, I was most amused as friends still there told me stories about it), and the whole thing really seemed in that way distant from me.

But those screams hang on. That poor girl.

It is a shocking and startling event. We watched it more or less live in the newsroom, just before starting our own morning show. Someone came in saying that "something" had happened on the WDBJ live report. Another local journalist quickly posted a recording on his FB page, and we then acquired a copy ourselves. Frankly, I thought it was a drive by -- a few wild shots that scared everyone, and then we'd all move on.

What I didn't know -- and wouldn't know for a while -- was that across town (I work at the local Fox affiliate, they were at the CBS station), the people in the control room were listening to a horrible silence. For those unfamiliar with TV, the reporter has what is known as an IFB -- it's that earplug they wear -- where the director and producer can talk directly to them from the control room. When you're in the field as Alison and Adam were, it's usually plugged into a cell phone that has been dialed into a special phone line back at the station. After something unexpected, the producer would probably get on the IFB saying, "What the hell was that?!" And the reporter would call in with an explanation and maybe an apology. Then they would all move on.

But Wednesday, all the control room heard was silence.

In our newsroom, we were all struggling to find out what happened ourselves. The police are typically difficult and unwilling to commit. At first, they would say there was an "incident," then after an agonizing period, a "shooting," then a "shooting with injuries." And that's when it went from just another story to something truly serious. Now it wasn't some weird, wacky "Thing" that happened, like accidentally falling off the stage or saying an obscene word on air. But how serious?

You send people to the scene, but it's nearly an hour's drive away from the station. The police have nothing further to say -- they are "investigating." Side rumors are flying. But most of all, as a journalist, you are in breaking news mode.

It's like how a doctor disassociates from a patient. You don't spend a lot of time thinking deeply about the subject and what it means; you just gather the information, get the picture, find out what happened and organize it to make an understandable report. The whole scene was on the one hand surreal -- we're more than familiar with the people, the place, and that sort of thing doesn't happen to people you know in places like that -- and on the other very businesslike.

It's only later that the philosophy seeps in.

The other thing that stays me is their youth, or rather the lives interrupted. I remember that time: when you're getting everything in place. You have found what you want to be, and you're on the upslope of that career, nothing but sunshine and the summit of achievement ahead of you. Both had decided to marry, having finally found the partner for that journey. And then ... nothing. It's done. All that potential, all that hope and ambition and joy. The future is no more. It's heartbreaking.

By Monday, we'll have all moved on. After all, in Syria this happens ten times daily. Being a journalist at all in Pakistan, in Russia, in Mexico, in too many places comes with the expectation of personal risk. I don't blame the world for losing interest. But it will stick with us for a while.

It was in the Corner Just Where I Left It

Every so often, I am struck by phrases we use casually, phrases that we all understand but have lost all of their literal meaning.

A longtime, personal favorite is "spare change." What is that? Is that to mean that you have money - you know, the money that you actually use - and then you have some extra that you keep around, but don't really need or plan to ever have any use for, but just have in case of an emergency, like a spare tire? People may have more money than they need, or even more than they could ever spend (I'm looking at you, Donald Trump), but when is that ever spare?

Another is "find the time," as in: "I just couldn't find the time for that." Where was this time that you found? Did it pile up in a corner with the dust and dirty laundry? How is it you didn't notice this time, just laying around there, before? And finally, who knew that time could just wander off like that? No wonder we seem to have so little.

Maybe if we had some spare time, like spare change, carefully boxed up in a safe place just in case we needed it. After all, we all have some extra time we're not using, right?

Be This Guy

From BuzzFeed

We all like to think we would be that guy - the one who holds his morals and stands up in the face of evil. But I think about this every so often, and I fear I might have been worse than simply not being that guy.

"13 Minutes"

“I find Elser is someone to be proud of because he wasn’t an aristocrat or an educated man, he was an ordinary German craftsman and he chose to resist. He had that moral courage inside him. What makes his story even more remarkable is that he managed to resist in the countryside, because it was easier to keep to yourself in a big city. There was more anonymity there. In the countryside everyone knew everyone else so there was more pressure to conform.”

It's really embarrassing, in a way. It's not like all sorts of people didn't resist, or actively work against the Nazis.  There was an active German underground - it doesn't get as good press as that of the French (who needed something to cling to after a lot of their Jews seemed to disappear, among other things) - and there are a lot of other examples of people under Nazi rule who at worst managed to make the machinery of oppression grind very slowly and poorly, and at best actively fought.

Richard Pryor on the Nazis: "Was iz das?" "Oh, nothin'. Just funning around..."

However, history is more commonly full of people who would rather be left alone while they get on with their lives. In fact, if you go through all history carefully, you find the general rule is like that in the average American election: 20 percent on each extreme end, and about 60 percent in the middle. Or, f you want, split into thirds: one third for, one third against, and one third who want to be left alone to go about their business.

The Nazis provides a particularly invidious example, and not just for the reason you might think. With 20-20 hindsight, it's easy to see their evil from top to bottom, starting with mass killings of not just Jews, but political opponents, other troublesome religions, the mentally retarded, the handicapped, and on and on. There's the absorption of all society into a grand social scheme, the usurpation of children from their parents. But at the start, especially for your average person not paying close attention, this wasn't so clear. Then, they seemed an understandable, crypto-conservative/socialist reaction to the tough times ... with cool uniforms. If one is honest, it's easy to imagine joining up for the parades.

Triumph of the Will

What does this mean? One perhaps should approach exciting political ideas - especially those that claim to solve everything easily - with caution. And one should be humble. Though we may hope to be Martin Niemöller, we generally fall into that middle third, just going along to get along ...

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak for me.