Tuesday, November 20, 2007

How to point your fingers at people

Why do reporters always congratulate each other for having managed "not to point their fingers at anyone" in a piece of journalism? This was posed as a rhetorical question from Mads Brügger who visited the department today and spoke in favour of subjective and, yes, well, moralizing journalism. You investigate a story and find fault with particular people - so why not explicitly blame them?

Well, blaming as such ought not to be a controversial aspect of investigative journalism, so it's surely the manner of blaming which can be controversial.

How do you usually point your fingers at people in writing?

One award winning way is described well by James Etthema and Theodore Glasser in their Custodians of Conscience (1998):
"For journalists who must honor objectivity yet evoke outrage, ironist rhetoric holds great stylistic appeal."
In a chapter on 'The Irony of Irony-in-Journalism' they show how investigative reporters simply quote people and then, just as simply, present facts that contradict or undermine the quoted statements. Alongside each other, those words and deeds/facts create an ironic contrast and appeals to ironic knowingness among the readers. We're put in a position to shake our heads at the liars or hypocrites and say: Yeah right!

Brügger, I believe, was basically pulling away from such subtle yet well-known montage techniques and encouraging reporters to show as well as tell (by saying that, well, "at least it has worked for me").

Friday, November 09, 2007

Small world

All this time I have completely overlooked a striking, if almost completely irrelevant connection between Wallraff and Thompson: In Denmark (and probably elsewhere too) a big nose is sometimes dubbed 'a günter' and sometimes, yes, 'a Gonzo'.

If Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers...


...then what?

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Close Writing by Sontag

“Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described,” writes Susan Sontag by way of introduction to her “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964). Her essay is not an argument, but a reflective description, an exemplary one, in which Sontag encircles the elusive notion of Camp through a series of propositions which are stated with bold authority: “Camp is… / Camp taste has… / Camp is art that… / The experiences of Camp are… / Camp taste is, above all,… / The Ultimate Camp statement: …”

Yet Sontag’s notes are notes indeed. Her propositions are tentative, and they’re illustrated or rendered plausible by examples that are compared and contrasted. So examples serve as qualifiers that mark differences between pure Camp and Camp that fails, naïve Camp and self-conscious Camp, etc. The angle changes and the light shifts as we go along, and I kept thinking that this ought to be tried out as a rhetorical exercise. By way of a parallel treatment, paragraph by paragraph, even sentence by sentence, one might approach, let’s say, the elusive notion Gonzo journalism or Gonzo sensibility:

If “the hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance” what is the hallmark of Gonzo? If Camp is “a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers”, what is Gonzo? If “without passion one gets pseudo-Camp… merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic” what quality differentiates pure Gonzo from pseudo-Gonzo? And so forth.

Basically, Sontag’s notes made me try this at home, shifting my focus into my fingers.