Here is something small but big that happened this week and speaks of a generation gap within journalism. I write from the perspective of having worked the overnight shift at CBS News when I started out, choosing stories off the wires to lead hourly newscasts. I was young, and I sometimes got it wrong in terms of news judgment.
Last Sunday, when Kobe Bryant died, when word was just spreading, a political reporter for the Washington Post tweeted a link to a Daily Beast report from 2016 detailing a charge of sexual assault against Bryant. The 2003 case was settled out of court; it looked ugly and seemed believable in the broad outlines. The Post reporter apparently wanted people to remember that Bryant’s was not a blameless life and that the abuse of women is real.
The internet erupted and the reporter said she received death threats. The editor of the paper (hello boomer) emailed her that she was damaging the Post and should take her tweet down. She was put on paid suspension. Hundreds of Post staffers signed a letter protesting her punishment for merely tweeting out a news story. She was reinstated.
All this received big coverage in the press. Here is an aspect I haven’t seen mentioned. It has to do with moral imagination and respect, with empathy and the essence of tragedy. These are things it can take time to know.
Bryant had just died. The wreckage was literally still smoking. People were just learning what had happened. It was a national shock—a helicopter falls out of the sky and this 41-year-old sports hero and his beautiful 13-year-old child and seven of their friends and colleagues were suddenly taken from life, snatched away. Fans in Los Angeles, with nothing to do with their grief, spontaneously gathered at the Staples Center, where they wept. In the news reports you could see people grappling with that very modern question: Why am I sobbing at the death of someone I never met? What was it that he meant to me, how did a stranger reach into me so?
Part of the grief was surely about how life can turn on a dime: nothing is guaranteed, “You know not the hour.”
But the point: The wreckage was still smoking. People were absorbing. And, as Americans used to say, “There is a time and a place.” That is not the moment to send out on social media, from an account that includes the great name of your journalistic institution, your reminder of perhaps the worst thing Kobe Bryant did in his life.
In newsrooms they were preparing his obituary, working hard to get all the facts right, to capture his athletic greatness, to get at his hold on the public imagination, and to make it all hang together in a way that has force and sensitivity.
In the obit of a public figure you must absolutely include information on the subject’s major scandals or embarrassments. This is a journalistic and even historical necessity. There is no “speak no ill of the dead” in journalism. Often you must. Sometimes it’s the lead. Sometimes it’s the entire story.
But usually it’s not. Here is how the tweet struck me. It was like you go to a wake for a neighborhood man who suddenly died, and everyone’s grieving, and some guy walks up to the family and says, “Sorry about your loss. But let’s face it, he did embezzle funds from the bank.”
The reporter apparently has a cause, and it’s #MeToo (hello millennial), and she has written of her own memories of abuse, and she appears to be quite the warrior. (It was probably better for journalism when reporters hid their causes, but that’s another piece.)
It is good to have respect for your own trauma, and your causes, but of course what happened Sunday wasn’t about her but about the dead, and the grief that was washing over millions.
All this is connected to something larger, a more difficult question we have trouble getting right in the age of causes. It is that you can’t judge somebody’s life by the worst thing he ever did. The worst thing he ever did is part of the story but it’s not “the story.” It’s too strict a standard, it’s not realistic, and though it pretends to be unblinking, it is really unknowing. A life, even a small one, is a big, dense, effortful thing, a real drama that can’t always be easily resolved.
Those who threatened and crudely insulted the reporter were idiots, and in a nation of 330 million you’ll have a lot of them.
But for those who were offended, it’s not that they’re stupid and blind. It’s not, “They’re men and don’t want to hear the truth of what men do.” It’s that they take it as assaultive when you smack them while they’re weeping. And they rightly resent it when they sense you are opportunistically using a painful national event to score points for your cause.
It would strike them as cold.
* * *
We end with what is ending, the impeachment trial.
We’ve written of the need for Senate witnesses, especially John Bolton and Joe Biden. The question may be settled before this column goes to print. If, as expected, the Republicans refuse more witnesses, the French saying will be true: “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.”
They will pay a high reputational price, and the president’s position will be further clouded: “Sure he got off—in a rigged trial.”
The impeachment rested on a charge against the president. The Democrats insisted he did it. The Republicans had said he didn’t. Now a Republican insider has apparently come forward with an unpublished book that says, “He did it.”
It would be wrong not to subpoena him and get him under oath. This is a trial. Mr. Bolton has key evidence. It cannot be justly ignored.
It is that simple, and history will condense it down to that.
The rationales for refusal don’t hold. “It would take too long.” It doesn’t have to if the president, the Republican majority and the chief justice agreed it should happen. If the president were wise he would waive executive privilege, make a great show of welcoming more testimony, take the blows, and emerge—as he knows he will in any case—acquitted.
And if it took longer, so what?
“We want to get this thing done, make it go away.” It won’t go away, the president’s impeachment is in the history books.
“The House should have done it.” That’s a process argument, not a justice argument. You’re supposed to be the steadier, more mature chamber.
“It will only help the Democrats.” But you never know what is going to happen in testimony. Mr. Bolton would hurt the president, surely. Would Mr. Biden? His presence would get Republicans showily and for the first time where Trump supporters want to go: to families cashing in on proximity to power, to swamped-up Washington and its nefarious ways.
That wouldn’t hurt Republicans—it is their subject matter.
“It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.” It will be a cloud over those who made it.