A couple of days ago, I asked what folks thought of the idea of journalists as moral arbiters. Not any individual journalist, necessarily – though some seem to do a fine job, professionally anyway – but journalists as a whole, and the stuff they put together when they’re working in concert. You know, like newspapers and stuff.
I talked about Corey Mintz and his tweet naming people who spread RIDE locations by Twitter on Christmas Eve as an example of how one of the most fundamental characteristics of a good journalist works in a moral context. The naming and shaming is an essential part of this: journalism holding people to account, not just the rich and powerful, but paying attention to all of us as we pay more attention to each other.
There’s a flip side to this, too, which was splashed across the Star’s front page (albeit below the fold) the day after the RIDE story broke. The print headline was “Why some go above and beyond,” (the online hed is “The Case for Virtue”). It’s a story about Arland D. Williams Jr. by Oakland Ross.
Williams was on Air Florida flight 90, the one that plunged into the gelid Potomac on Jan. 13, 1982. The crash was remarkable largely because it happened in downtown Washington DC, and the pictures that appeared in newspapers the next day were pretty dramatic. It had something else, too: the man in the water. Most of the stories the next day reported something the rescue helicopter crews said they saw. There were six people alive after the crash, either in the water or on the not-yet-sunk hull of the 737-222. This is how the Washington Post told the story of survivor No. 6 in the next day’s edition:
“He was about 50 years old, one of half a dozen survivors clinging to twisted wreckage bobbing in the icy Potomac when the first helicopter arrived. To the copter’s two-man Park Police crew he seemed the most alert. Life vests were dropped, then a flotation ball. The man passed them to the others. On two occasions, the crew recalled last night, he handed away a life line from the hovering machine that could have dragged him to safety. The helicopter crew – who rescued five people, the only persons who survived from the jetliner – lifted a woman to the riverbank, then dragged three more persons across the ice to safety. Then the life line saved a woman who was trying to swim away from the sinking wreckage, and the helicopter pilot, Donald W. Usher, returned to the scene, but the man was gone.”
That’s a story, as everyone from People to NBC realized in pretty short order.
Eleven days later, journalist Roger Rosenblatt wrote about him in Time. No one knew who the man was yet, so Rosenblatt gave him a nickname that stuck:
“So the man in the water had his own natural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an implacable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he held it to a standoff. He was the best we can do.”
It took a while to figure out it was Williams, but when they did, he was given various posthumous honours. His family got the US Coast Guard’s Gold Lifesaving Medal at the White House from Reagan. The bridge the plane had damaged in the crash was named after him when it was fixed. There’s now a scholarship named after him at his alma mater, and there’s now even an Arland D. Williams Jr. Elementary School in his hometown.
But unless you walk or cycle over that bridge, go to the Military College of South Carolina or happen to find yourself in Mattoon, Illinois (population: 18,555), those things, as lovely as they are, would not have kept the memory of the last things this man did and didn’t do. That’s what stories are for, and stories are what newspapers do best.
We know lots of stories thanks to newspapers and the folks who write in them, but this sort of story is a very special sub-genre of those. It’s an object lesson, for sure; like Rosenblatt says, Williams “was the best we can do.” But the story, qua story, is maybe the most valuable thing of all. Telling stories about heroes and villains ensures they survive, not just as individuals, but as characteristics, as possibilities, as well as encouragements. The fact that Oakland Ross is telling this story, 30 years after it happened, tells us that, sometimes, the good we do is not buried with us, but lives on, and we with it. We all know John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and a host of other child killers, war-mongers and genocidaires. In fact, the obsessive coverage of these people – I’m sure you can stop reading this for five seconds and name three more famous killers from just the last couple of decades – has been cited as the reason some people actually do it. Say my name.
Stories about these guys – they’re mostly still guys – are compelling, in the way Frederick Clegg or Iago or Milton’s Lucifer are. But good stories like Ross’ – well considered, well after the fact, and focusing on genuine merit rather than the more instinctual and ultimately selfish mothers who save their own kids — are rare. The fact leaves one with the sense that maybe there are fewer Williamses in the world than there are Dahmers.
And when these stories are well done, they are better than the ones about the evil-doers, which have a tendency to convince us that there are monsters among us, that certain people are just evil. No story I’ve read about Williams implies he was anything other than a man whose priorities were in the right place at the right time. He is not, like stories make Dahmer seem, separate from us, in a different category, but represents, and was, the best of us, someone who, though he may have been bitchy with his wife that morning, or sworn at a driver in the way to the airport, or thought about how he might get away with this or that lie at work or at home, at that time and in that wet, frozen place, did good.
And now that it’s no longer news, Ross is free to talk to some philosophers, discuss the good and various approaches to it, bring up the so-called free-rider problem that is always chipping away at our social contract, and wonder about utilitarian good versus altruistic good, and spark some thought on reflexive good and what that means about the variety of human natures. Pretty good for a front-page story. And good for journalism. There’s no reason there shouldn’t be more of it. When people complain that newspapers are always covering the bad news, that they’d like more good news, newspaper people shouldn’t scoff, as I know they do. They should realize that good news stories don’t have to be about kittens or bland acts of low-impact seasonal charity; they can be about a man who died 30 years ago after spending the last 10 minutes of his life very well.
This is the second in a two-part series. Read part one here.
Bert Archer writes about media for the Toronto Standard. You can reach him at barcher@torontostandard.com and follow him on Twitter at @BertArcher.
