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Letters,
The Walrus,
19 Duncan Street, Suite 101,
Toronto, Ontario, M5H 3H1.
17 August 2012
RE: John MacFarlane’s Editor’s Note, September 2012 Issue.
Dear Editors,
Buried deep in
the back of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite
Jest, endnote 269, is a character sketch of pro football punter Orin
Incandenza by his former roommate, the reclusive hypochondriac Marlon Bain.
Bain describes Orin as a near-pathological liar, a serial seducer of mothers with
young children that he (=O.) contrives to fall madly in love with him, to the
point where they (=the mothers w/ children) forget all about their brood; much
the same way that O. feels his own mother serially philanders and apportions
her attention. Orin goes so far as to deploy a series of numbered seduction
strategies, selling each married woman a different version of himself, which
Bain says demonstrates how “there can be such a thing as sincerity with a motive.” Then there’s a long and kind of funny
anecdote before Bain recapitulates as follows: “It is not that Orin Incandenza
is a liar, but that I think he has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported.”
This same
distinction underwrites John MacFarlane’s Editor’s
Note in the September issue of The
Walrus magazine. Mr MacFarlane writes about the difference between
advertisers and journalists, which cohabit a magazine’s pages but for very
different reasons: advertisers have something to sell, while journalists have
something to say. Mr MacFarlane puts it thusly:
“Journalists, including me, often feel conflicted
about advertising: grateful because it helps pay the bills (including
salaries), and because financial sustainability is an editor’s best friend;
when a magazine is solvent, its owners tend to leave its editors alone. Grateful, then, but wary, because
advertising is always self-interested, which is what distinguishes it from
journalism. [Emphasis added.] This is also why journalists sometimes
dismiss it as irrelevant or, worse, dishonest. Yet what could be more honest than
the shoemaker’s desire to have people buy his or her shoes? Seen in this way,
the marketing of products is a natural consequence of the making of them, and
in a consumer society it’s hardly irrelevant, and only dishonest when it’s,
well, dishonest — that is, when it makes false claims.”
I submit to
you that the prenominate gloss is not only wrong but insidious and bad, and
just plain hard to believe given Mr MacFarlane’s editorial mantle. The fact is
that journalists sell stories: writers ‘pitch’ stories to editors, editors pick
the most interesting of these, and then work with the writer to get the story
into print. Along the way there are hundreds of ‘editorial decisions’,
arguments over usage and pitch and tone and angle and what to quote and what to
cut. The overriding aim is to tell the story in a way that interests readers.
To get more readers to turn more pages, some of which pages, of course, carry
advertising.
For Mr
MacFarlane to suggest that journalists are not self-interested, and that this
is what distinguishes them from advertisers - people who sell things - is
literally ridiculous: silly to the point of being surreal, reckless, cavalier, wilfully
blind, and then almost unbelievable when he ends his Editor’s Note with The
Walrus’s own sales pitch:
“Like the shoemaker, we at The Walrus want to
sell what we make to as many people as possible, and so we advertise the
magazine’s virtues wherever and whenever we can. Is this self-interested? Yes.
Irrelevant? Not if it puts the magazine into the hands of more readers.
Dishonest? Our ads claim The Walrus is fearless, witty, thoughtful, and
Canadian. You tell me.”
Mr
MacFarlane’s argument is the same as Marlon Bain’s: that some people regard the
truth as something to construct, while others regard the truth as something to
report. Mr MacFarlane puts advertisers in the constructed camp and journalists
- at least journalists at The Walrus
- in the reported camp. (This is what makes advertisements for The Walrus different
from advertisements in The Walrus.) The problem is that the
distinction is completely false; it’s a non-distinction, mistaking a difference
in degree for a difference in kind. So-called ‘reported’ truth is every bit as
constructed as plain old advertising: a journalist can only talk to so many
people, put the camera in so many places, run down so many leads, ask so many
questions. The process is even more constrained by word counts and page limits:
subtle distinctions that require lots of space to develop and explain rarely
win out over points that are more straightforward, pithy, exciting, salacious,
surprising.
A more
intuitive way to make the foregoing points is maybe this: the reason there are
many different magazines and newspapers is that there are many, many different
ways to tell the same story. In fact, there are as many ways as there are storytellers,
and each journalist can be only one of these. To suggest that even some journalists
tell better stories than others - do more reporting than constructing - is to
mistake journalists for prophets.
There will
always be more to say than pages on which to print; the map is not the
territory, and my world, at least, does not unfold in neat, clear, narrative
arcs. The most obvious things are often the easiest to overlook but also, in
many cases, the most important: in this case, that without readers there would
be no writers, even at The Walrus. For
Mr MacFarlane to suggest otherwise is, with great respect, simply false
advertising.
Yours,
As ever,
