- Debra Pickett’s book Reporting Lives
Journalists who turn to fiction know better than to make their alter egos paragons. What journalists do—or at least the way we do it—is morally sketchy even to ourselves, and the finest thing about us is that we do it anyway. After all, liberty dies when ignorance reigns, and if it’s up to raffish reporters to hold ignorance at bay, well, someone has to. Then again, journalists also think of themselves as the finest people alive. We’re complicated.
This knack made Sara a good interviewer. And on camera, writes Pickett, “she seemed somehow to glow, as if lit from behind. There was a liveliness to her when she was broadcasting,” a lilt to her voice that made her seem “as warm and friendly as a fictional next-door neighbor.” Sara’s problems came with the conversations people don’t do for work but simply because they’re living in the world; she’d “never mastered the easy banter of the newsroom and was known for a particular stinginess with compliments.” When colleagues told her they liked a story she did she had a lot of trouble returning the compliment; her mind drew “a complete blank, totally unable to think of a single thing they had ever done, let alone something she’d actually liked.”
But she turned in a story anyway. Part of it described her quandary.
Despite the lack of pictures, the Sun-Times ran the story. “ORPHAN PORN” was the headline.
Sara knew that she was supposed to have reformed, to have found some new respect for humanity on her walk through the slums. That was the story Trisha was telling everyone. It was the reason they all wanted to be close to her. They thought she’d found some kind of purpose, some meaning to it all. And they were hoping they might breathe it in, as easy as catching a cold. But, really, she thought as she took a long drink of her coffee, it was all a lie. The truth of it was that she had simply lost her nerve.
