I wonder if I was the only person surprised by the reaction to Jack Layton’s death. The last time I checked my thoughts on the man, which was about the time he became leader of the federal NDP, I figured he was a false-seeming true believer, someone whose political abilities went further than any other leader of his party since at least Broadbent, but not far enough to make him a truly remarkable leader of the party I’m most consistently sympathetic with.
I’ve read more than a dozen tributes in various forms to him, many of which include a personal anecdote about when they met him. Most say how genuine he was, how he really cared. I’m sure he cared about the big causes he espoused — there’s ample evidence of that — but the couple of times I met him, he seemed like a glad-hander, someone who’d never mastered the art of coming across like anything other than a politician bent on convincing you he cared.
He was also the best thing to happen to his party in ages, possibly ever.
I say all this not because my opinion of him matters too much, but to offer at least one piece of evidence that it’s not only Christie Blatchford and Barbara Kay, two people presumably unsympathetic to Layton’s causes, who were bewildered at the outpouring.
I don’t think you have to be a hater not to be a true believer, though judging from the reactions to both these columnists, but chiefly to Blatchford, I guess I’m in the minority.
Everyone who cares about the piece has read it already, but here’s a link in any case. And here’s a link to Kay’s, who wrote that she didn’t think Layton should have had a state funeral. And Kevin Libin’s piece in the same paper about what he saw as the crass exploitation of Layton’s death by politicians, political parties and non-profits (which wasn’t much commented on, as far as I can tell).
There are a few things that concern me about the reaction to Blatchford’s column in particular, not least of which is how bad it makes Layton’s supporters (otherwise known as The Left) look. Much of it, like this piece here that looked forward to Blatchford’s own death, came across like a mother getting mad at her kid for swearing by telling him to shut the fuck up. If it’s tactlessness you’re offended by, don’t call Blatchford names. If it’s respect you think she lacks, have a little yourself. Common sense, of course, and I’m sure everyone is now suitably ashamed of themselves for their hasty Tweets and Facebook posts.
But what disturbed me more about the reaction was that it suggests that a large number of people think that journalism, at least in this instance, should the opposite of what it actually must be.
Like fast.
People derided Blatchford for writing her thoughts so quickly, for one. And yet timeliness has always been a main measure of the success of professionalism of any journalist, whether they’re a reporter — which Blatchford still at heart is — or a columnist, which is what she’s now paid to do. She, like many of us, figured that Layton was going to die, and soon, so she would have been collecting her thoughts on the subject, just as newspapers have for decades written their obituaries of people in advance of their deaths. Whether she planned on writing her own obituary of the man I don’t know, but when news of the deathbed letter came through, and when the reaction was as immediate and fulsome as it was, it became obvious fodder. She wrote quickly, and was able to get it online within 14 hours of Layton’s death. In journalistic terms, that’s a good thing.
It was also against the grain.
It was clear by the time she probably began writing that people were taking Layton’s death hard and personal, and that things were skewing toward the hagiographic. It is a good journalistic instinct to try to puncture that. You may be wrong, common opinion may be wrong, or more likely, you’re both partially wrong, but producing counterpoint is one of journalism’s essential functions. Speaking truth to power is important, but so is helping to crack complacency. Already by the day’s end, a blanket of extraordinary praise was being heaped on the man. People were overdoing it, like the Nathan Philips graffito that called Jack “an icon of humanity.” Blatchford was not wrong; it was Diana-like (though as Margaret Wente points out, that’s not necessarily a bad thing). And to use an image I ran into more than once in the attacks on Blatchford, if the corpse doesn’t have to be cold to praise a man, why should it have to cool before wondering whether all the praise is deserved?
Journalism does not have to be tasteful; in fact, it’s often damaged by being too concerned about how certain people might react to it. The only respect you have absolutely to maintain is a respect for your audience. Not for their feelings, necessarily, but for their intelligence, and their needs as people who read, listen to or watch journalism. And one of the primary needs is not to be told what they already know, or given an opinion they already hold.
As many people pointed out, Blatchford’s column was also not characterized by respect.
There’s a reason journalists have so often and for so long been outsiders among various social hierarchies. They’re not paid to be respectful, or nice or even, when dealing with interview subjects, scrupulously honest. I learned this early, when I started interviewing people and realized I was not having friendly conversations, but had to ask people information that would, in other circumstances, have been simply rude. An extreme but utterly common example would be the cub reporter being sent to the home of a dead teenager within hours of an accident asking for a yearbook photo and, if they’re especially good, asking the parents how they feel about their kid’s death.
In order to do your job as a journalist, you often have to dispense with common courtesy and manners. This can sink into a person, like it does with salespeople who can’t stop selling. It doesn’t make them pleasant, necessarily, but it often does make them good at their jobs. And despite what even some of the more reasonable criticism of Blatchford has to say about the column and her career as a columnist in general, she is good at her job.
“Now, I never met Layton,” ran one especially stupid but not unusual reaction to Blatchford, “but the one thing that was obvious about him was that he was a really decent and good human being. You didn’t need to know him personally to see this or to be moved by it. He was a great guy, it simply radiated out of him, and that Blatchford chose to ignore this and focus on what she thought was an overly-ambitious nature in the man, was mean.”
Greatness did not radiate out of the man simply (though it may have done so complicatedly; time may tell). That is a matter of opinion, which is the ambit of Blatchford’s column. Was she showing her political stripes by ignoring this self-evident radiation? Possibly. But she was being no more subjective than, say, the irreproachable Stephanie Nolen was in Friday’s story about Indian anti-corruption faster Anna Hazare.
A lot of the bad feelings surrounding the various reactions to Layton’s death come from some deeply felt but ultimately not too useful thoughts about death itself, and media’s role in reporting it. Bereaved people deserve nothing but sympathy personally in the aftermath of a death. This goes beyond simple manners and into the realm of the stuff that makes us human. But that sympathy, the de mortuis nil nisi bonum injunction, does not apply to modern public speech. Or at least, it shouldn’t. There are relatively small windows around events during which they’re newsworthy (that is, when people will actually read stories about them in large numbers), and that’s when what needs to be said needs to be said. As soon as the public discourse started painting Layton as something more than an able politician with a recent, remarkable electoral breakthrough, we needed someone to remind us that, as George Orwell wrote of Gandhi, saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent. Christie Blatchford is not like Orwell in many ways that I’ve noticed, but on that day, she served both politics and the English language rather well.
