I’ve done outside jobs: journalism. I learned not to mistake a journalist for a god-thief. Journalists’ theft is a very different kind of stealing. They press in from outside someone’s life, often at a time when a person is most vulnerable, gate-crashing grief or triumph. They exploit that person’s narrative purely for commercial gain: providing content for their employer to justify their own salaries. This may require feigned empathy and sympathy or even a cash payment to the person exploited.
In the process, the most valuable possession that person has, their life’s narrative, is bleached of nuance and complexity for the purpose of mass consumption; rendered down to the nearest cliche.
By my count there are a dozen categories of cliche in journalism, victim or villain being the bookend examples. Fiend, thug, hero are obvious others. I can’t think of a worse way to treat someone’s life than to strip it down to one of those cliches for the sake of the ephemera of news and entertainment. To pretend to speak with authority about a person’s life when you may have met them for a day or less, maybe only half an hour, or not even that, and in the artificial lung of an interview situation, is fraud. Yet this is considered to be in the public interest, an ethical, useful activity.
Even the most researched 10,000-word profile for The New Yorker can do little more than relay tics and quirks. What they looked like, their clothing, their hairstyle. Where they lived. What the gossipers would have us believe about their behaviour; or the courts. They have not been that person, lived in their skin or had the vantage point of being many years around them to get a good enough look at their unique core.
Better to do inside jobs. Not to do it would be to say that in our time people were not worth writing about in any serious way. Our tiny, solitary epics were too trivial, puny. Or we had so perfected ourselves as a species it was beneath us to bother with more than outside jobs.
Craig Sherborne is a Melbourne-based journalist and author of the memoirs Hoi Polloi and Muck. His first novel, The Amateur Science of Love, is published by Text on June 1.
