The Prophetic Work Reporters Do
(The following are remarks I gave at a Sept 25 online symposium “A Prophet Is Not Known In Her Town: Conversations on Visionary Women,” sponsored by the Hank Center for the Catholic Heritage at Loyola University, Chicago. The topic was “Women Leading in Media.” I reflect on my work over the years for PBS-TV, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and at my local NPR affilate).
“My work is loving the world” is the opening line of a poem by Mary Oliver called, “Messenger.” No words better describe how I’ve always felt about my work as a “messenger” in both print and broadcast media. It was never merely a job or even a career, but a calling.
I considered it a privilege to tell the stories of people, especially those who live on the margins of society, and to invite to speak for themselves those whose voices are often muted or ignored.
At The Washington Post, I wrote about teenagers whose parents turned them over to the court system, claiming their children were “uncontrollable.”
At The Wall Street Journal, I spent several months chronicling the story of a religiously conservative business executive quietly caring for his son dying of AIDS.
At PBS, I had the moving experience of covering one of the first spiritual retreats for clergy sex abuse survivors, who, because of the compassion of the therapist leading the retreat, felt for the first time they were truly being heard.
More recently, working for the National Public Radio station in central Illinois where I now live, I was able to document how landlords were charging excessive rents to low income tenants for apartments in crumbling, roach-infested buildings because they considered these tenants “high risks.”
My work is loving the world.
This vision of the role of the journalist comes largely from my early experiences at both The Post and The Wall Street Journal.
Philip Graham, the legendary former publisher of The Post and the husband of Katherine Graham, used to say journalists write the first draft of history. And one of my editors at The Journal would often quote Finley Peter Dunne, an early 20th century writer for The Chicago Tribune. Dunne famously observed that a reporter’s job is to “comfort the afflicted — and afflict the comfortable.”
Today, both statements can seem idealistic, even quaint so drastically has public opinion of journalists changed. So I was deeply heartened a few months ago when a young writer named Benji de la Piedra contacted me about a book he is researching on a former editor of mine at The Post.
Benji said something that I kept turning over in my head. He referred to journalists as “folk heroes,” as people whose strength comes from their conscience and their wits.
St. Benedict once said, ask the youngest members of a community what they think because wisdom often comes from the young. I thought after talking with Benji, this young writer really gets what prophetic reporting is all about.
Benji went on to say that he considers heroism a kind of improvisation: the ability to adapt to changing circumstances and do something more creative than what you have done in the past. The ability to adapt to changing circumstances and do something more creative than what you have done before.
As I look back over my career as a journalist, I witnessed many improvisations and encountered many prophets. When I arrived at The Post as a reporting intern at the age of 21, there were few women reporters assigned to the national desk that covered the prestige beats such as the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
All of that would change in the seven and a half years I worked at the paper. Why? Because in the years before I arrived at The Post, a group of visionary women reporters filed suit against that paper and Newsweek magazine, also owned by The Post, seeking to move women out of the feature section and into the news reporting and editing jobs that previously had been an all-male club.
These women took a risk, not knowing if they would win the lawsuit, or if they would even get to keep their jobs. They did both. And not a single day went by when I didn’t feel gratitude for those prophetic women on whose shoulders I was standing.
Over the years, I had the opportunity to work for many outstanding women editors who would play prophetic roles not only in journalism but in society as well. One of my early mentors at The Post was Judy Luce Mann. She would move from editing into writing one of the first columns in a national newspaper focused on women’s issues. Judy showed how fewer federal dollars were spent on breast cancer research than on less prevalent cancers and on AIDS.
In another column, she proposed a ban on U.S. funding for Egyptian hospitals that performed female circumcisions. And that practice in Egypt was eventually stopped.
When I left The Post, I went to work in The Wall Street Journal’s Chicago bureau. My bureau chief was Sue Shellenbarger, one of those rare supervisors who cared as much about my personal development as my professional output. She would go on to write groundbreaking stories about the effect of the workplace on family life.
Under Sue’s guidance, I was able to grow as a reporter, and The Journal eventually offered me an assignment as a foreign correspondent, in London, something that was barely possible for women just a generation older than me.
Much has changed and improved since I began my journalism career decades ago, but much still needs to change. Women are generally under-represented in top editorial positions, something especially true for women of color. We are often held to double standards.
The #MeToo movement showed how real sexual harassment is in the workplace, newsrooms included. But equally common are bullying bosses, who speak to women in ways I don’t believe they would ever speak to a male colleague.
If we look at the prophets in Scripture, we have to acknowledge that they are ignored more than they are heeded, and this is often true for journalists. But as the great Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote to a young activist, “Do not depend on the hope of results … concentrate … on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”
Concentrate on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work.
Two years ago, my career took a new turn. I left daily journalism to focus on writing books on spirituality themes and leading retreats across the country. With journalism, I tried to change minds. Now I try to change hearts and minds.
There was another important change. A reporting assignment led me a few years ago to visit several monasteries. I became enamored of the contemplative rhythm of monastic life and am now a Benedictine Oblate, a lay associate of a monastery in Kansas. Being an Oblate means incorporating the monastic values of listening, community building and practicing hospitality of mind and heart into my daily secular life.
Oddly enough, these were the same values that guided my years as a journalist. Only now I practice them through my books, a weekly blog, writing occasionally for US Catholic, and through a return to what had been my first love in writing, poetry.
I can be more open now about my spiritual grounding, which is my Catholic faith, something I felt I had to keep under wraps working for secular media outlets.
My most recent book, “How to Live” is about living monastic values in daily secular life. And a new book which will be out next year is based the letters written to me over the years by a Trappist monk at Gethsemani Abbey, Thomas Merton’s abbey.
So this is the new work, but that work is still loving the world. Thank you.
