I'm proud of this ridiculous thing I do for a living. It makes me happy. It is a lot of arrested-development fun. And it gives me the kind of power and platform I don't really deserve.
But there are times when being a journalist in today's climate embarrasses me. Makes me feel dirty and ashamed. I've always wondered why the reporters in the movies are so often portrayed as greasy, sneaky profiteers chasing the hero.
And then Sean Taylor dies in a terrible way, and it reminds me.
Journalism isn't very human sometimes. It isn't very compassionate or empathetic, either. Objectivity, the alleged bedrock of this profession, is both the excuse we hide under and a lie.
There are slants and shades in everything you read, hear and see as the line between Chris Wallace and Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly and Katie Couric and Geraldo Rivera becomes blurred and smeared as entertainaournalism. Asking emotional humans, with all their embedded prejudices and experiences and baggage, to be without bias (conscious or subconscious) is like asking night not to be dark. All we can do is aspire to clinical objectivity as professionals and hope that too many people don't get trampled and harmed when we inevitably fail.
CRUEL AND UNFAIR
And we've done some failing on this Taylor story. What happened to him and his family is cruel and unfair. That's it. It isn't endemic of a people or a region or a school. It is just unspeakably cruel and unspeakably unfair. I don't know how anyone could lack so much compassion that they would somehow blame a city or school or culture to this awfulness, as if a city or school or culture could possibly deserve something that brings this kind of sobbing and wailing.
And yet that's what Time Magazine and MSNBC and FOX and CNN and ESPN have wanted to discuss in recent days because the machine must stay fed, and it matters less and less what kind of garbage we throw into its insatiable maw and try to pass off as nutrition. Why does this keep happening in Miami -- the city and the university? What's going on down there? As if Taylor somehow brought this grief upon himself, as if South Florida brought it upon itself. The late Darrent Williams, killed in a drive-by at 24, isn't representative of Oklahoma State's thug culture. But Taylor, killed in his home at 24, is representative of the University of Miami's?
TOO MUCH GOSSIP
I can't imagine how terrible it must be for Taylor's broken family to watch the television and see their late son/brother/boyfriend turned into a talk topic and one-dimensional stick figure because we, the media, didn't and couldn't have a complete picture of their beloved and didn't have the time to wait for one to develop. We didn't have very much information immediately after Taylor's death, but we had too much time to fill without new information, so too much of Taylor's televised eulogy became noise and speculation and gossip-cloaked-in-journalism about his troubled past.
A DUI and a gun-waving incident aren't irrelevant, but they weren't all Taylor was, either. Brett Favre, rest assured, won't be eulogized with excessive emphasis on his pain-killer addiction, especially not if he were to die this horrifically. How do you think your grieving family would like to see you defined on television by your one or two worst public moments?
God bless him, Taylor's brave and tranquil father, suffering the worst pain a human can, has been as strong as anyone I've ever seen in front of TV cameras.
There would be plenty of people applauding, and no one blaming him, if he lashed out angrily at all the people trying to do their job on his lawn.
I just wish sometimes that my profession had more of his grace.
