By Michael Miner
The reporters who presume to cut reality down to size come in two broad types, I told her. There are the clerks who think reality can be reduced to three-by-five note cards that if stacked in the right order turn facts into truth, and there are the sojourners to whom reality is lambent flame, balalaika airs, and the tall tales of blind crones remembering the night of the soldiers. These types aren’t mutually exclusive, but truth in all its glory is usually up the hill a ways from both of them. “Listen,” replied NPR’s Jacki Lyden, “journalism is absolutely imperfect.” Lyden, the sojourner who wrote Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, didn’t quite buy my categories, and she put in a word for the clerks. A stack of small facts is better than no facts at all, she said. “In a place like Syria it’s not journalism–it’s dictation. Instead of somebody assembling three-by-five cards, Assad assembles them. He’ll tell you what to write.
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“In Jordan, which is a fairly benign monarchy, I’d get the same answer no matter what part of the country I was in, because there was one source of news–the king–and no one dared question him. When you don’t have the right of a free press or the right to express yourself, all you can depend on is gossip and rumor. The light journalists shine on things is a haphazard one, but at least we get to pick up the flashlight.”
Lithium finally settled her down and laid the reins of her life back in her own hands. “What she remembers most about being sick,” Lyden told me, “is how powerful she felt. How wonderful and giddy it felt to really think you could do these things. And how she would love to have that star burst of confidence again.”
Yet she agrees that reporters think of themselves as a little mad and that they probably are. “I think journalists are much more willing, even in this day and age where everything is so controlled, to live by their wits than most people,” Lyden said. “They know they could make more money doing other things. They know their lives are not safe in ways they imagine doctors’ or accountants’ lives to be. They’re called to it more often than not because they have a mad passion for it. And they do these things that are really quite intrusive.
She was speaking of Mancow Muller’s Halloween show, a night of freaks, strippers, and heavy metal whose highlight was the much ballyhooed opening of a casket. This exhumation was represented ahead of time as an act of charity. A young American teaching English in Guatemala had been hacked to death with a machete, and the heartbroken family, too destitute to return the body to Chicago, had turned in desperation to the morning man at WRCX. Muller offered to reach into his pocket and finance the casket’s shipment, on the modest condition that he be permitted to open it onstage and present the decomposing corpse to the whooping faithful.
You can’t amuse all of the people all of the time. Muller’s other big attraction that night, a 600-pound snake swallowing a live donkey onstage, turned out to be just as bogus as the corpse. Denied the spectacles they came for, some fans booed and departed in a surly mood.
