Looking Inward

No one likes journalists, including other journalists. And nowhere was this more apparent than at the July Pacific Islands News Association meeting in Apia, Samoa. Long-time regional rivalries and personality clashes rose to the surface at the general business meeting that was-wisely or not so-scheduled as the final item of business before the closing reception.

As journalists, most of us have spent our careers criticizing the incompetence and absurdities of governments around the region, yet our own meeting was a travesty of proper procedure and a platform for inflated egos to make speeches to each other. The PINA constitution was suspended at one point in the meeting, then reinstated an hour later when everyone realized we could not elect constitutional officers without a constitution.

There were several long-time Pacific government people in attendance at the PINA meeting and I met other key Samoan government officials during my time there. I must say I was much more impressed with their integrity, skill and compassion than that of many of my fellow journalists at that meeting. I kept imagining these government people writing up the PINA proceedings for their constituents. They might have done a better job than most of the journalists around the Kitano-Tusitala Hotel that week.

I once served in a Pacific government myself and I remember a reporter coming by to interview me about something. What I noticed immediately was that he had a very formed opinion on the topic and was merely asking me questions that would confirm his theory. I realized he was just talking me through the story he'd plan to write all along.

When we criticize journalists, we usually point to problems of accuracy, getting the facts wrong. A woman who does training around the Pacific told me that in no Island place she had been to-and she had been to many-did the local media report accurately on her program. "Even when I wrote it for them," she sighed, "they got it wrong!"

We have a lot to do in Pacific journalism just to improve this one element of our job, accuracy.

Yet what I saw in the PINA meeting made me fear a more subtle failing of ours. That is, journalists with big egos and strong opinions should not be trusted to handle the news. Let me make a distinction here. In editorials or columns like what you're reading now, egos and opinions can be displayed in all their glory. But when we pretend to be bringing our readers the real story, our egos and our firmly-held prejudices can only get in the way. Young journalists always want to write in the first person, but I have to tell them to get the "I" out of their work. There was an avant-garde film in the 1960s called I Am A Camera, and that's what I want writers for this magazine to be. Our duty is to deliver the story to our readers as if we were cameras, just clicking away at the reality in front of us.

If you want to be important or wealthy, journalism is not a good career path to take. Satisfactions must come in other forms, like knowing you're helping to keep government honest, or giving voice to people who seldom get heard.

For once I will not criticize a government in this column. For once (and I must note this is probably the only time this will happen for awhile) I want to say how much I admire some of the really compassionate, smart and trustworthy politicians and government functionaries I've met since I've been on this job. Politicians, like journalists, can be corrupt, opinionated and egocentric. But citizens get to chose their leaders-or throw them out of office. Our readers, listeners and viewers don't always get freedom of choice when it comes to the journalists who serve them. If I think of the office holders I know in the region and I compare them to the journalists I know, I just wonder which group comes out better on the integrity meter. I will get in trouble if I give my opinion here, so to avoid all the spiteful letters, I'll just continue to wonder about this.