The Journalist, the Writer, and the Bias of Observation
Two men sit at opposite ends of a diner. One listens and the other watches, but neither speaks, and in the silence between them is a vast difference of intent.
The journalist uncaps his pen with a purpose fully formed. He listens for the bones of a thing, the sturdy facts, the names, the sequence of events. He sees a woman in a red coat at the counter, the way she stirs her coffee, the way she glances nervously at the door, and he thinks: Where is she going? What does it mean? His business is to find out, to take the dirt off a buried truth and to present it in clean lines.
The writer, on the other hand, is a digger, not a dust-brusher. He sees the same woman and wonders what brought her to this diner and whether she’s lonely. He notices the imprint of a ring on her finger and wonders whether she is a woman who spurned her lover or the woman scorned. His purpose is to find, not the hard and polished thing that is called truth, but the truth of how things weigh upon the soul. The journalist seeks the conclusion, the writer, the becoming.
And so the journalist and the writer sit in their opposite corners, neither speaking, both believing that they are the honest ones. The woman in the red coat finishes her coffee, pays her bill, and leaves. Somewhere, a headline is written. Somewhere else, a novel begins. And in neither place does she exist as she truly is, for the Kantian thing-in-itself is notoriously elusive.
* * *
My father was a writer. A poet, more precisely. I remember asking him once, “Why poetry?”
He was sitting outside in the winter sun, his writing pad folded on his lap, the way a man keeps a thing close that he doesn’t quite need but isn’t willing to put away. He didn’t answer right away. He usually never did. He took his time with things, feeling for the shape of a thought before giving it words. Finally, he said, “I liked to see. And I wanted to make sense of what I saw.”
I must have frowned at that. I had thought that a writer was a man who already understood, that he wrote to explain the world to others. But my father made it sound as though a writer did not write because he knew—but because he didn’t. That writing was not the sharing of understanding, but the search for it.
"So," I said slowly, a tempting thought beginning to take shape in my mind, "So…you were guessing?" I held my breath and looked at his face carefully, trying to keep my face straight.
His eyes twinkled, the way they did when he knew I was playfully sparring with him.
“Guessing,” he said finally, "I suppose you could say that.” He shifted in his chair, tilting his face toward the sun, as if it might warm a memory loose. “Only guessing isn’t quite right, is it? A man guesses when he doesn’t know. A writer guesses because he knows something is there but can’t quite see it yet. Like feeling around in the dark for a thing you know is in the room. You catch hold of edges, corners. But you don’t see it whole, not at first. And sometimes you guess wrong. You put the thing together wrong, and it feels wrong, and you have to start over. That’s a risk, of course. But if you guess true, if you find the shape of it just right, then one day you look at it and you think—there it is. There it always was. You just hadn’t found the words for it yet.”
He paused, looking at me, measuring whether I would understand. “You ever seen a dog catch a scent in the wind?”
I nodded, trying to go over what he had just said.
“So, you wrote to follow the scent?”
He chuckled and made no answer.
* * *
Charles Darwin once wrote, 'How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!' So, is observing without an agenda even possible? Or a man who believes he sees without bias is just a man who hasn’t examined his own mind yet?
The journalist, for all his protestations of objectivity, has already picked his angle the moment he starts looking. He sees a slum and writes of its poverty; a writer sees the slum and understands the way poverty distorts the soul. The journalist’s trade is in presenting reality in such a way that the reader may form an opinion, preferably one he has already predetermined to be the correct one. The writer’s task is to immerse the reader in reality until opinion dissolves into something more complex—something resembling understanding.
Journalism is, in theory, the act of unveiling what is hidden, stripping away falsehood and deception to reveal the raw, unvarnished facts of a matter. But this is an illusion. The very selection of facts, their arrangement, the adjectives applied to them, and even the order in which they are presented—all conspire to fit a narrative. Indeed, the journalist’s greatest deception is his pretense of objectivity.
Of course, there are times when the division between writing and journalism blurs substantially. There are journalists who write with such artistry, with such sensitivity to the human experience, that they transcend the mere presentation of facts and elevate their stories to something akin to literature. And there are writers whose works, despite their artistic merit, are also exercises in truth-telling, where every word serves an agenda, a moral, or a political point. The problem is not that one is an art and the other a science, as the world would like us to believe. But this much can be said — journalism strives to uncover truth, while writing seeks to discover it, although neither, in the end, can escape the human tendency to frame reality in ways that serve a purpose.
Two questions come to mind: Then, is writing merely a form of journalism sans the responsibility? And do modern journalists even recognise their responsibility, let alone shoulder it?
A nation can be shaped not just with laws, nor with bullets, but with words. Journalism does this every day. It steers the great ship of public opinion, not always with a steady hand, and often with a hidden map. It decides what must be known and what must be forgotten. It names heroes and villains, and sometimes, with a well-placed headline, it even swaps them. The power to tell a story is the power to steer the course of reality, and if that is not a responsibility, then what is?
So in the end, does everything have an angle? Of course it does. A man can’t write anything worth reading without putting a piece of himself in it. A story, a report, even a stray remark—they all come at you bent and shaped by the hands that carried them. The writer admits to his leanings. He knows that no story is ever just a story, that the telling of a thing changes the thing itself. He doesn’t stand outside his words; he stands right in the middle of them, waist-deep, with his hands in the clay.
We are all fumbling in the dark, and perhaps that’s where we’re meant to stay. But I want to keep reaching, keep guessing—because every now and then, flashes of understanding dawn upon me, and in that brief, flickering glow, I almost see. It is in these moments that I find my blindness redeemed.
“जाने कितने लोग शामिल थे मिरी तख़्लीक़ में
मैं तो बस अल्फ़ाज़ में था शाएरी में कौन था?”
“Who knows how many were part of my creation—
I was only in the words, who was in the poetry?”
- Bharat Bhushan Pant.
Image source: The Writing Master by Thomas Eakins.
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