Mirrors and Waves
J.J. Goldberg

PRACTICING THE CRAFT of journalism — the pure, old-fashioned news-gathering kind — is a lonely way of life. Jewish journalism is doubly so, or tenfold. If the media seem less compelling than they should be or used to be, that’s the biggest reason.

Journalists are supposed to stand apart. We are the mirror in which the community sees itself. Ideally, the reflection is a true one; for that to be so, the mirror must be still and flat. The reporter is not meant to be part of the story, but to report it straight. Bringing in your own feelings is like putting ripples in the mirror: The image may be more interesting, but it’s no longer true.

No, no report is entirely objective. The reporter decides what topic to cover, what questions to ask, which facts are the most telling. Then the story must be written in an engaging manner, so as to catch the reader’s attention and, yes, to sell newspapers. And yet, every added flourish shades the story. Objectivity and truth are ideals: never achieved, always to be striven for.

To be a mirror means one more thing: It is to stand apart from the crowd, facing in the opposite direction from everyone else. Editors tell reporters they’re expected to be monks. By this we mean they may not be engaged in the issues they’re covering. They may not join political parties, demonstrate for or against the causes they write about, throw themselves into the world they’re covering.

If they do their job right, they will also find themselves removed, like monks, from the fellowship of those whose interests they share. They must cultivate and befriend their sources, the people on whose doings they report, only to betray them in the end.

For all these reasons, reporting the news is a lonely job, and reporting Jewish news is infinitely more lonely.

Here is the trap of Jewish journalism: the journalist must stand apart, disengaged from the issues, the passions and especially the community he or she covers. But what does that do to the journalist as a Jew? What is the point, the reward in being Jewish, if not the community, the beliefs, and the passions?

The loneliness isn’t just existential. The Jewish community, to a greater degree than most of us realize, dislikes news reporting on Jewish life.

It’s commonplace to blame the institutions and leaders. They want to appear in a positive light in the eyes of their constituents. They expect the community’s journals to tell their story as they want it told.

But the greatest pressure comes from the readers. Jews want to feel good about being Jewish. To the extent that they are engaged as Jews, they are proud of their heritage. They want to think well of the institutions that represent that heritage. They don’t want Jews and Judaism held up in disrepute. And yet, making public institutions look bad is what journalists are supposed to do.

A caution: We speak of journalism and news reporting as though they were one and the same, but they are not. There are other types of journalism that are legitimate and honorable: opinion and advocacy journalism, public relations and advertising, service journalism. There are essays and blogs. None of these imposes the rigors of hard-news reporting, and some of them pay a lot more.

The plain truth, though, is that news reporting is the core of the profession. Essayists can’t tell you why the space shuttle blew up or how many soldiers died in Iraq last week. Most of all, they can’t tell you what really happened in City Hall. That takes reporting.

That’s why there’s a heroic aura to the hard-boiled gumshoe reporter, going back to Woodward and Bernstein to the battlefield correspondents of Normandy and Bull Run, and on back to the trial of John Peter Zenger.

Newspapers, since their inception, have been in the business of reporting the doings of those in power. They tell the public what their leaders are doing to them, in their name, with their tax money. They make democracy possible; without them there is no informed citizenry. That’s their first job. It’s why they’re singled out for protection in the U.S. Constitution.

If compelling journalism seems in short supply within the Jewish community, it’s mainly because the community can’t decide whether it wants it. Maintaining an open debate on Jewish affairs through a robust adversarial press isn’t an issue for the Jewish press alone; it raises the question of whether we are willing to take the risks and pay the prices necessary to be a community.

J.J. Goldberg is Editor-in-Chief of the Forward.