As a journalist I tend to value things that reveal the truth. I like investigative reporting and news on important issues. As I’ve reembarked on studying statistics this term I’ve begun to remember their value in generating reliable answers to difficult questions. Likewise, I’ve always admired science for it’s ability to illuminate the world. However, there is one subject that people in the harder fields of study tend to disregard: English. However, in my opinion, fiction, while not explicitly true, can reveal important truths about the human condition. I’ve been thinking a bit about fiction and the arts in general because I think it can often explain things in a way that is truer than the cold facts. While in high school I learned more about racism from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mickingbird than from any textbook I ever read. Later in college, I began to better understand mortality through reading William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
While I’m a sucker for fiction novels, I think it joins in the larger category of what art can do to help engage people. In the following video, Sir Ken Robinson, an educational expert, discusses how arts in school can help kids to engage and learn to be better critical thinkers.
A lot of what I love about journalism is that at it’s core it gives people information that hopefully allows them to make educated decisions and think critically. I think that there is something that journalists can learn from art: the ability to engage people in meaningful ways and say things that people identify with as the truth on a emotional level. I don’t mean to suggest that journalists should always go for emotion and drama. Indeed, it seems like the only news organizations only use one emotion: fear. Despite this I still think some of the best stories have a strong emotional core to them, and journalists, with all our concerns for hard facts and statistics should be aware of the essentially human nature of our profession. This profile of a cigarette vendor published by the New York Times is a great example of this. While it contains many hard facts describing the current situation of cigarette taxes in New York, at its core it tells the story of at a very real and human level.
Art is intrinsically aware of the human aesthetic and emotion. Journalists can learn something from that.
