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137 Chapter Twelve Dead Baby I made my way in the bitter November cold to the village of Muradiye, where bodies of the dead lay on the ground covered with straw. The chubby hand of what looked like a doll stuck out of one pile of hay. The baby’s hand was bluegray with death, its skin the texture of rubber. The child’s mother, also dead, lay nearby. After interviewing survivors of the earthquake in this eastern Turkish village in 1976, and talking to rescue workers in several towns and villages, I returned to the provincial capital of Van to try to catch the last flight back to Ankara to file my story, and almost didn’t make it. Chaos reigned at the dingy airport, and after an hour of delay and confusion, passengers were not given boarding passes but simply were released from the terminal building like cattle and allowed to stampede toward the only plane on the tarmac. After a mad dash we fought our way up the stairs and into the door at the rear of the plane, and those who got there first got seats and those who got there later did not, the airline apparently believing in a kind of musical chairs approach to boarding. I wrote my earthquake story ,“Villages of the Dead,” during the flight, struggling to decipher my notes and in some cases having to guess at the spelling of names, and in Ankara I sent the story to Newsweek editors in New York from the office of my hotel, where I had to use a Turkish Telex machine with a keyboard that lacked the usual“qwerty”arrangement of letters on Western keyboards, so that it took me hours to hunt and peck my way through the transmission. But the story finally got through, and Newsweek devoted a full page to it that week in November 1976. It was an important story, the human tragedy of the earthquake and the death and injury and homelessness of those impoverished peasant families in Turkey. My emotional news report might have done some good—for example, in moving Americans to donate money or food, clothing, and tents to the International Red Cross to help these suffering people. But did the full truth get through? Did my subjectivity and bias get in the way? 138 What’s Wrong Years later in Washington, having been a Newsweek correspondent and then a CNN correspondent, I thought back to the emotion I had felt earlier abroad covering stories such as the Muradiye earthquake, and I felt conflicted. Empathy and sadness were powerful forces driving me to write a story that might move readers to help the suffering villagers. But these emotions also distorted the truth. What was I to do? Just as hype bends the truth in such stories as the Oklahoma City bombing, emotionalism and subjectivity also distort reality. As a journalist at home and abroad, I tried to be as objective as possible, knowing that, of course, achieving total objectivity is impossible because only a cold, inhuman machine can achieve that state. Objectivity is more of an aspiration. Author David Mindich quotes one unnamed reporter as comparing journalistic objectivity to the North Star. The implication is that reporters will never reach it but by orienting themselves toward it they can find the right way. Journalistic objectivity is important because stories often have policy implications . A reporter presents facts to the public, and the public then forms an opinion. That public opinion then pressures the government to take action. The hard-news reporter’s job is to select and present facts in such a way that the public can make a fair, reasonable judgment after being fully informed. The value of minimizing subjectivity in straight-news reporting, at least within the Western model of journalism, is that of reducing the risk of error in presenting all the relevant facts to the reader or viewer. Get too emotional and you become blinded by anger or sorrow and don’t see the complete picture. We’ve all seen this when we become angry at someone and make sweeping, unfair generalizations (“You always . . .” or “You never . . .”). Later, when we’re calmer and more rational, we see that reality is more complex, and to describe it correctly and fairly we know we must try to be careful, exact, precise (“You sometimes . . .”). A journalist is supposed to be detached and professional, like a doctor, so that emotion does not get in the...

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