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98 6 Experience and Interpretation Modern war correspondence involves a set of judgments composed simultaneously of experience and interpretation. The report is only one part of a much larger design that governs being a journalist. The act of reporting war is a situated one with many elements involved: the kind of war being waged, the presence or absence of bureaucratic procedures for clearing stories with the military, and the occupational problems common to a particular time in history. Conscription pushed the boundaries of experience and consequently of interpretation of war. This chapter casts the journalist’s experience and interpretation of war into the larger context of genre to give some indication of the association between reporting wars and a felt ethical obligation on the part of society’s authorized witnesses to the slaughter of its young men and women. I will examine the interpretive journeys taken by reporters to identify the most dominant tropes or organizing strategies for understanding experience and then speaking or writing it. To see trope as a strategy rather than a figure of speech prepares us better to understand why the journalist should be viewed as an embodied ethos, the main argument of this chapter. The tropes I found most often in the archival data include irony, tragedy, surrealism, romance in its epic sense, and common sense as a matter of realism. Each of these interpretive stances can be linked to the set of circumstances, both social and material, within which reporters worked. Each presupposes a particular political and social reality. Each speaks to the relative presence of bureaucracy in a war, as well as to the moral context within which war was fought as a solution to political problems. Experience and Interpretation 99 When journalists depart for war zones they begin a long and arduous journey, both physically and mentally. The ever-present possibility of death will keep them hyperalert. Their task is to create reports. Historically the report has been a very capacious medium. Some reports are simply chronicles of events. Most, however, are stories. The significance of the traces of tropes, whether in a journalist’s copy or in his private papers, is that when you find them you can be sure that the journalist is using his critical faculties. In fact, traces of irony or references to realism as a matter of common sense are guarantees of a critical intelligence at work. Conscription and the culture of a military solution to political problems make being a journalist ethical in essence. Journalists don’t have ethics. What a reporter is, in the marrow of his being, is ethos. He is ethos because he is a teller of tales and because all his tales present reciprocal claims binding the reporter with the listener, the viewer, or reader, with the soldier, and with other reporters. Ethics involves recursive, contingent , and interactive dramas of encounter and recognition, linking responsibility to interpretation. No matter where a report appears—in the Detroit Free Press, Reader’s Digest, Springfield Journal Register, the New York Times, Newsweek, on NPR, CNN, CBS, or a local radio station—a national public is always presupposed by it and present in it. These stories are the ties that bind. Further, each interpretive trope has corresponding, identifiable genres in the larger discursive world of fiction and literature. Unlike literature, the tropic aspect of “telling” is scattershot through a journalist’s letters, diaries, and journals; the primary evidence for this book simply indicates that these kinds of experiences occur in the reporter’s workaday world. It is not that reporters imitate literature, it is that literature imitates life experience—in this case journalistic experience. The sets of interpretive strategies I encountered sometimes issued in published accounts and sometimes not. In other words, by experience and interpretation I mean to refer to an interwoven interior landscape of the modern and postmodern journalist, an individual-in-community who makes war meaningful for himself and soldiers, but most especially for his public. Most of the time the reporter situates himself in the larger community of his fellow Americans. On a few occasions, he will situate himself in the community of other journalists. When this latter case occurs, the reporter is signaling the failure of the process at some level. This happened in Vietnam where it set off noisy alarm bells indicating that something was seriously amiss. Seldom does a reporter go beyond the national unit to situate himself in humankind—a point that supports the main argument of this...

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