Buying the Night Flight (2 page)

Thus, at worst it can distort our critical thinking and substitute the bogus immediacy of emotion-ridden impulses for the far more sober reflection of the serious journalist, the person who is so steeped in the knowledge of his or her subject--whether science or Srebrenica, whether health care or the Hutus, whether cultural analysis or Cambodia -- that the reporter can be trusted to weed out the dross and to focus laser-like on the crucial aspects of a subject!

Thus we must understand that the importance of "the gatekeeper"--the interpreter who stands in for the reader at the great events of history -- is not diminishing, but instead suddenly rising, on many levels.

You are now probably expecting me to rend my garments or tear my hair or indulge myself in any of those biblical expressions of frustration over the diminishing numbers of correspondents working abroad today; but I am not going to do that. In fact, I am convinced that, in the world that is coming, the gatekeepers will, of necessity, be called back to duty.

The annual meeting of the International Press Institute was held in Boston in the spring of 2000. The organization is made up of publishers, media owners, and a few working journalists like myself from all over the world. During that particular meeting, one after another of the most influential media leaders in the world spoke about the new role of the gatekeeper/correspondent.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the
New
York Times,
told the group, "Let's hold on to a central thought: 'This is a great time to be a journalist' People will continue to need a reliable guide through the mysteries of the Internet. It confirms what we know, that words are not powerful but that understanding is powerful--and that is what we do. In the future, there will be a lot of competition to the traditional media -- but that does not mean that the traditional media is headed toward destruction."

The great American diplomat George Kennan had already argued passionately that we have never more needed human gatekeepers, or, as he called them, "filters," because they have that special experience of reporting in depth, along with the informed intuition that goes into making a great correspondent who can go through the masses of undigested and undisciplined "news" awash in the world and to put it together in a form that makes sense of the world.

But perhaps the most eloquent commentary on the whole question of what newspapers and the news "business" in particular should be doing came from the brilliant analyst of the communications industry and communications psychology, Professor Neil Postman of New York University.

Newspapers should, for a start, get out of the information business and into the knowledge business... I define knowledge as organized information -- information that is embedded in some context; information that has a purpose, that leads one to seek further information in order to understand something about the world.... When one has knowledge, one knows how to make sense of information, knows how to relate information to one's life, and especially, knows when information is irrelevant.... The problem to be solved in the twenty-first century is how to transform information into knowledge, and how to transform knowledge into wisdom.
If
we can solve that... all the rest will take care of itself.

One could not possibly define the problem better.

***

Before we embark upon the night flight -- and I do believe that every human being has some of the magical seeking of the classic
Night Flight
inside herself and himself -- I want to take this opportunity to offer some advice to the students and young journalists who often ask me for guidance before they take off from their varied ports of call.

As Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, "Avoid the cliché of your time!" Even when I was a child, I felt that if "everybody" was doing some thing, that was something to avoid at all costs. Real change in the world comes from the self-motivated, searching and inspired individual willing to test his or her sacred honor to do work that is noble and creative. In short, he or she must avoid taking the common road!

Many young people, apparently consumed with the need to control, ask me: "How do you
control
your interviews?" They usually tend to be searching for clues to control one's life, for shortcuts to it and for secrets, which will allow them to have everything now, right off the bat!

I have to be honest and tell them that that just isn't the way it is. I have to tell them that the way you control your interviews (or any other part of your work) is to know more about the subject than the other person does. This advice, as you can well imagine, is seldom greeted with deafening applause. (In fact, most of the questioners don't like the advice at all, but in fact that
is
the way it is. Everything else is falsity--and that should never be a part of journalism.)

Next, realize that nothing comes out of nowhere -- everything comes out of somewhere. All of the crises of nations, like the crises of individuals, have roots. What's more, those roots are knowable and analyzable, but you must literally dig for them and you must then have the knowledge and the courage and the honesty to correctly identify them when you discover and uncover them.

Personal note: I always get upset when I see the word "unpredictable" applied to leaders, to political situations within countries or to cultural behavior in general. Saddam, unpredictable? Fidel, unpredictable? Ronald Reagan, unpredictable? Hardly. Their behavior is as tiresomely predictable as the sun rising and going down. But to find those so-predictable patterns of personality and psychology, you have to understand their cultural background, their personal family history and something of their own psychological responses to the world in which they grew up and grew old. (Another secret: That's the great fun of journalism!)

Avoid at all costs the smart, know-it-all, wiseacre "get him" journalism that unfortunately typifies so many young journalists today in the "elitist press." They sit around wondering, "Who should we 'get' today?" while scoffing at any idea of patriotism, of citizenship, or of ceremony. These attitudes are incontrovertibly and disastrously destructive to the world that decent people everywhere are trying -- and too often, dying -- to build.

Watch for trends in the world, instead of focusing on the sensationalist minutiae that so congest and contorts our newspaper columns and our television screens. Dig deeper, and then try to relate cross-cultural or cross-global patterns. As a matter of fact, this can be done -- indeed, should be done -- even here within our own country.

In the mid-1970s I taught one fall quarter at Syracuse University. The subject was foreign correspondence, and I asked my students to find a part of the local scene that they could analyze in exactly the way an overseas correspondent would analyze a foreign country. One wrote about the local trailer camp; one covered and analyzed the local Indian reservation. They were smart and sensitive young men and women, and they understood immediately that we were trying to transpose the lessons of good foreign correspondence over the structures of this country and to learn about ourselves from the exercise.

Finally, think of aiming at having the kind of "informed instinct" that you can employ so well in your analysis of the world and at the same time aim toward a "principled pragmatism" as one of the major values the world needs in leadership. Finally, employ in your approach to your journalistic subjects, in the words of my old friend, the great psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, an "empathic immersion." In short, immerse yourself in a subject and in a personality with as much understanding and compassion as you can, while trying always to bring to your interviews and to your analysis your own most polished and intuitive insight.

Finally, remember always that writing, when done with intelligence, with spirit and with passion, is like a great love affair. Me? I'm still in love.

Georgie Anne Geyer
Washington, D.C.
December 2000

Once when I asked a wise editor what exactly one should include in the acknowledgments for one's books, she responded with: "All the people who have helped you with the book." But that was a little difficult for me because legions of people all over the world, in every culture and in every language, have helped me.

Even after all these years of writing, I still wonder at the way that men and women open themselves to journalists and writers and grant us the privilege of entering their lives and their souls, their dreams and their terrors. This is a particular honor in so many other countries, where suspicion is so often a constant handmaiden to existence. And so, first, I want to thank all the people, all over the world -- presidents, caudillos, and rapscallions, yes, but also the good, decent, ordinary people even more -- who opened their doors so graciously and generously to this young American writer during the years that she was "living"
Buying the Night Flight.
That I was pillaging their souls was incredible enough; that they actually helped such a shameless "thief" is even more wondrous.

On the professional level, I am first grateful to the editor Merloyd Lawrence, who originally published this book with Delacorte Press in 1983 and to Radcliffe College for sponsoring it so beautifully in their "Radcliffe Biography Series" of American women in our times. I am at least equally indebted to Brassey's, Inc., that splendid publisher, and particularly to President Frank Margiotta and to editor Don McKeon for republishing the book this year and for doing such a fine job with it. Brassey's is a small publisher, which illustrates once again that "small" can exceed in literary and professional excellence.

On the broader scale, the life that is related here would not have been possible without the tolerance and encouragement of my wonderful parents, Georgie Hazel and Robert Geyer, and my incomparable brother, Glen. I also want to thank Northwestern University, the Fulbright Program, the
Chicago Daily News,
where

I worked so joyously for sixteen years, and my own Universal Press Syndicate, where I have been a devoted "creator" since 1980. Universal not only houses and inspires the finest talent in the world but is one of the most genuinely moral institutions in the entire world. Indeed, this book is dedicated, with deep affection and eternal admiration, to our president, John McMeel, but I would surely be remiss if I did not mention my two immediate editors, Elizabeth Andersen and Alan McDermott, two of the best and most agreeable professionals I have known.

Looking back, I realize I have been blessed beyond belief, in an era when so many American institutions are sinking into the quicksand of cold personal ambition and civic vindictiveness, to have worked consistently with such superior organizations and with such charming and vibrant human beings.

When we finished this updated version
of Night Flight,
as people have come to call the book over the years, Brassey's copyeditor noted in passing that the last two chapters were somewhat different from the first. I thought about that, and then I thought, "But of course, they are, I am. now thirteen years older." Wiser? Let's not carry things too far.

--
Georgie Anne Geyer
Washington,
D.C.

You'd have to say the odds were enormous and discouraging. In 1960 a Chicago bookie might have given 1,000 to 1 against Georgie Anne Geyer -- Gee Gee, as her friends call her -- ever being in the position to write this dazzling book.

Consider what she was up against.

Her ambition was to be a foreign correspondent. Fine. Most newspaper reporters want, at one time or another, to be foreign correspondents. It's the ultimate reporting challenge, covering another country, a war, a revolution. It's always been the glamor job of newspapering.

The problem was (and still is) that only a relative handful of one thousand or so American daily newspapers had foreign reporters on their staff. The others picked up the news wires.

And those who had the foreign assignments dug in and kept them until death or retirement. A city-staff reporter could grow too old just waiting for an opening.

Beyond the lack of opportunity, though, there was the simple fact that most reporters -- even the very good ones -- weren't good enough. Foreign correspondents had to be outstanding reporters, exceptional writers, self-motivators, imaginative, determined, adventurous, able to cover a war or a fast-breaking revolution, and do a scholarly analysis of a country's history -- but written so clearly that a subway commuter could understand it.

And add to that Gee Gee's most serious handicap -- as an old rewrite man at the
Chicago Daily News
put it: "Her sexual persuasion."

She was a female when females on newspaper staffs were just about as common as snail darters.

I should correct that. There were women on newspapers. You could find them in the "women's pages" writing fluff about fashions and home furnishings and raising children. Women's work, the editors called it.

But out in the newsroom -- and the
Chicago Daily News
was typical of major newspapers of that era -- a woman was as rare as a teetotaler.

A woman would usually have the education beat. The editors' thinking was that since most teachers were women, and they dealt with children, covering them really wasn't a manly job.