"Hope is in helping others"
The other day one of my in-laws asked me if I ever miss journalism.
“Not at times like these,” I said, which was the truth if only in a limited sense. I don’t miss working on disaster coverage. My entire career in media has careened from tragedy to tragedy; I suppose they all do, when you consider that while both are typically newsworthy, loss is far more commonplace than gain. In any case, I worked at Doctors Without Borders/Médécins Sans Frontières during the Ebola crisis and spent my year there looking at the treatment tents full of the dead and dying, the grave fields. I cut footage about fistula treatment in Nigeria and children’s emergency medicine in five countries on the border of Syria, where we could not acquire footage amidst the ongoing civil war. I cried in the bathroom once, and then became numb.
I worked at Talking Points Memo during the 2016 election and came back from lunch during my first week to the first time I would cover a mass shooting. I covered the Pulse nightclub massacre and the Las Vegas festival sniper; I covered the Congressional baseball shooting and the Paris truck attacks and more school shootings than I can remember; I covered the systematic murder of young black men by white police officers; I covered the Muslim ban and the opening of camps and the desecration of Jewish graveyards and hate crimes against black and Muslim and Latinx and Southeast Asian and East Asian people; I covered rapists and predators of women and men and children; I covered the systematic persecution and murder of trans people.
By the time I left full-time journalism to move to Ohio, where my husband was, I was crying my way through weekly trauma therapy, not actively, just sitting there and starting to cry and not stopping until the end of the session, not even able to isolate why I felt bad. I remember when I thought, oh, this is the worst it’s ever felt, this is as bad as it can feel. I thought it a few times, first when I realized that the best way to approach live footage of mass murder was to watch it as soon as it was available, and on repeat, so that it no longer had the capacity to surprise me, and then again and again with each new escalation. (As President Donald Trump (R) continued to incite violence against the press, I started to look up photos of workplace shootings for the same reason, so that if God forbid it happened in my newsroom, I would at least not be surprised by how it looked.)
The last time I thought, oh, I can never go back, now I know that this is the worst it can feel and I’ll never not know, I was covering Arizona’s 2017 special Senate election. It was November, a month before voting, and the Washington Times had just published an interview with a woman Republican candidate Roy Moore had assaulted when she was 14 years old. I read the headline and there it was, with a dull thud. Oh, I thought, so this is what it feels like when you lose hope. And that time I was right.
I covered the news. I always did, I always do. I believe that when the chips are down, a painful truth is always kinder, in the long run, than a well-meant lie. I am drawn to look at that which is almost beyond human comprehension, because I need to understand. But I don’t miss covering murders I can still see, interviews I can still hear. Often, I wonder if I would have been a better journalist if I was less obsessed with understanding, more able to look away. I wonder if I should miss it.
What I do miss, all the time, is catching crooked fucking politicians in the act. Pandemic profiteering comes as no surprise, as Jenny Holzer so famously noted. I’ve seen it nearby, at smoothie stores with signs in their front windows that say “WE’RE OPEN! FREE IMMUNITY BOOSTER WITH ANY MEDIUM OR LARGE SMOOTHIE!” It is craven and unforgivable, in my opinion, to put your employees and customers at risk for a financial incentive. That this behavior extends all the way to the U.S. Senate is not a shock, but it still bears typing in all caps:
(Some quick context: Three weeks ago, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) warned members of the Tar Heel Circle, a members-only group of North Carolina businesses and organizations, to “prepare for dire economic and societal effects” amidst the spread of COVID-19. Two weeks earlier, he “sold personal stocks worth between $628,000 and $1.72 million in 33 separate transactions on a single day.”
His office is handling the exposure of that information about as well as you’d expect:
“Carroll later reached out to say that the 'lol' remark was meant to express displeasure with NPR's earlier characterizations and not intended as an on-the-record response.”
As they say, lol!)
Burr isn’t the only senator who dumped stocks around the time that President Donald Trump (R) was making empty promises unsupported by any data about how his sheer force of personality and narcissism would keep the virus from American shores. Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), James M. Inhofe (R-OK), and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) “also sold major holdings around the same time,” according to the New York Times. Feinstein and her husband “sold $1.5 million to $6 million worth of stock,” while Inhofe made sales “totaling as much as $400,000.” Loeffler, whose husband is the literal chair of the New York Stock Exchange (!!!), “reported 27 stock sales worth millions of dollars starting on Jan. 24,” the same day she attended an all-Senate briefing on COVID-19.
I think a lot about this tweet. I’ve been thinking about it a lot more, lately.
I had a different newsletter planned for today, but last night when the tweets started coming the old adrenaline-hungry instinct rose up inside of me and demanded another turn in charge. You’ll get that piece about grieving the near future, which is already mostly written, tomorrow, unless of course an elected official does something else so Hague-worthy that I find myself writing a full thousand words about it before bed. You never know! (But they probably will.)
—R.