a real journalist?

I’ve recently been pondering this question: Am I a journalist?

It’s something I’ve reflected on now and then over the years, but these days I seem to be arriving at a different answer from before.

To be clear, this answer is not “no”. I’m not sure it will ever be a full, unqualified “no”. Journalism has dug its claws into me and I don’t think it’ll ever let go, nor do I really want it to. But when I search my soul these days I find that I’m much less committed to identifying, and being identified, as a journalist.

I started down this train of thought while reflecting on how I haven’t been doing original reporting for some time. Since I started working for Mekong Review two years ago, I’ve more or less stopped pitching to other media outlets, which means I haven’t been writing the articles, features and commentaries that used to be my bread and butter. I do still keep track of the news, but what I do with We, The Citizens is mostly curation with some commentary thrown in. (I do believe that’s important, which is why I’ve been doing it for six years now, but it’s not the same as original reporting.) It used to be a regular occurrence, but I haven’t had a byline in a news/current affairs outlet for what feels like ages. I haven’t tried to get into a press conference, queued outside venues with other journalists or shown up for events with a media badge for years. I no longer have the trappings of what is most commonly associated with journalists and reporters. So there’s that.

A tiny part of me feels a little guilty or ashamed of that. Not a real journalist, that little voice in the back of my mind hisses. Not good enough. It comes from the mindset that journalists should—have to—report; anything else is lazy armchair criticism.

But I haven’t been lazy. I produce a 32-page magazine—from commissioning every article to reading every word of every piece multiple times to working with a designer on layout to all the admin including contributor agreements, invoices and mailing addresses—every three months. I’m an active participant in Singapore’s anti-death penalty movement, I support families of death row prisoners, I attend court hearings, speak on panels, help man booths where I answer questions from members of the public about Singapore’s criminal punishment system and the war on drugs. I’m reading up on drug use and drug policy more than ever, unlearning and relearning. I might not be pounding pavements chasing breaking news, nor am I across as many topics as many reporters I know, but on some specific issues I dare say I’m just as much ‘on the ground’—if not more so—than most journalists.

In fact, that might actually be the ‘problem’: I am too on the ground, too close. I’m an activist, which means I’m no longer a journalist, because in many people’s minds those two things cannot go together. Although I’ve never bought that line—advocacy journalism is a thing, guys, look it up!—I’ve also long accepted that journalists tend to need some distance, that it is part of professional behaviour to stand back and away a little, to exercise restraint and look in rather than be in.

If that’s the case, what happens when the ‘stories’ strike too close to home? When the reporter persona feels increasingly difficult to maintain and reconcile with our fuller selves? We’ve had very different experiences, but I really related to Louisa Lim’s reflections, in Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, on struggling between long-held journalistic principles and her emotions as someone raised in Hong Kong watching the erosion of the city’s freedoms. Journalists aren’t machines; how can we, as people with hopes and dreams and ideals and opinions, really hold ourselves at a distance when earth-shaking things with devastating implications are happening around us?

I’ve always been sceptical of the notion of ‘journalistic objectivity’, but I see the sense in striving for impartiality and fairness, in the need to provide audiences/readers/the public with multiple perspectives so they’re informed of the conflicting views, the competing interests and complexities of what’s happening around them. That, to me, is what professionalism as a journalist is: I try my best to reflect different positions, treat everyone ethically and fairly (which is not the same as treating them the same!), and avoid oversimplification. I don’t find this difficult to reconcile with my activism: I can’t promise genuine objectivity or the “view from nowhere”, but I will try my damnedest to be fair and act with integrity.

What I see happening in the media, though—both in Singapore and elsewhere—isn’t actually fairness. Far too often the practice of ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’ has been ritualised to the point of meaninglessness, deployed in ways divorced from context, power and truth. Climate sceptics are given equal platform and space to the legions of scientists and experts with credible data. (Things have thankfully improved somewhat, but for years the urgency of the climate crisis wasn’t adequately communicated to the public, robbing us of precious time to get our acts together to take action.) US Republicans said something completely untrue or downright fascist? Oh God, let’s find something bad about the Democrats to point out for ‘balance’. The PAP going on a witch-hunt against opposition politicians or critics? We might not only get in trouble for pointing that out but also be perceived as “anti-PAP” with an “agenda”, so let’s parrot the PAP framing or report on it ‘straight’ without pointing out the uneven power dynamics. (I mean, why the fuck are we losing our minds with wall-to-wall coverage of Pritam Singh’s trial when wrongdoing was recently found in state institutions that have more real power than an opposition politician? Where are the journalists chasing those incidents up in search of accountability?) We’re ‘neutral’ journalists, so we can’t scream about horrific massacres and blatant war crimes; let’s write ‘objective’ headlines about what’s happening in Gaza—where ‘objectivity’ is measured by yardsticks clearly distorted by power and politics.

When ‘balance’ becomes more about covering ass than serving the public, when newsworthiness is dictated by clicks and eyeballs and capitalist profit motives rather than public interest, the value of journalism is undermined. When the people lose their faith in journalists and the media, entire societies suffer from this breakdown in trust. With authoritarians and fascists on the rise in multiple countries across the globe, it’s a particularly bad time for this to be happening—although I guess authoritarians and fascists are on the rise in part because this shit is happening. And I’m not sure that there’s enough collective effort, or even will, to reverse this tide. Not when the media industry worldwide is dominated by oligarchs, cronies, politicians, grifters and narcissists who, regardless of what they might say publicly, don’t really give a shit about democracy or justice.

It’s fucking grim. I can’t say I’m particularly enthusiastic about being a part of it.

My thoughts keep coming back to something a friend, also a journalist, said to me after I testified, for hours, before the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods (remember that clown show?) in 2018. I’d spoken about building public trust, about freedom of expression, about the need for a Freedom of Information Act, about the dangers of giving the government the power to determine what ‘truth’ is. I don’t remember it verbatim, but what they said was along the lines of: “Thank you for speaking up. You said things that the rest of us journalists cannot say.”

I understood what they meant, of course. There are risks to stepping out of line in Singapore, to challenging the state or the ruling party. For local mainstream media journalists, a powerful government can lean on editors and bosses to make life very difficult or unpleasant for you. And even if you work for an international media outlet or newsroom, where press freedom and freedom of expression is ostensibly respected, there are restrictions, too: speak out too openly or too strongly and you could be pinged for failing to maintain journalistic objectivity or breaching company policy.

But it struck me: If those were things that had to be said, why can’t journalists say them? If we cannot say what needs to be said, then what’s our role and purpose as members of the press and the media? How, then, are we serving the people?

Years ago, when I was starting out as a baby freelance journalist and surrounded by people who insisted that there was absolutely no way one could be both an activist and a journalist—an opinion expressed in tones that made clear which they believed to be the superior role—I gradually came to the conclusion that living in accordance with my convictions was more important than the ‘journalist’ label. It’s been a decade now and I’ve only doubled down on this view. There are plenty of journalists out there; reporters whose skills and experience and ability to get scoops and break news vastly outstrip mine. I value and appreciate their efforts. But, in an authoritarian context like Singapore, what we urgently need are people who can, and will, say what needs to be said. And if that means being told that I’m “not a real journalist” or “not a journalist” at all, then so be it.

This also feels increasingly the case outside of Singapore, which is probably why I’m feeling so depressed and disillusioned with journalism as a whole. It feels like the world is on fire and the journalism industry is shitting the bed. I’m actually kind of relieved that my current job editing a literary magazine has removed me from the frontlines of news reporting, because in the face of so much bad I’m struggling to maintain the distance I deployed as a general news reporter for a variety of news outlets. The detached tone I wrote news articles with feels completely insufficient to convey my horror, my anxiety, my desperation in the face of executions, wars, ethnic cleansing, crisis and oppression. How can I write in a professional ‘business as usual’ way when things are so clearly not as they should be? How should I hold myself apart and write in my neutral reporter voice when it feels like the necessary—and reasonable—response is to cry and scream and rage at all the cruelty and pain? As Warsan Shire once wrote:

I wonder, as I’m writing this, if I will come to regret putting this out there in the world. Perhaps one day—maybe even one day soon—I’ll need a job in a media outlet that prizes journalistic objectivity, perhaps I’ll write a polite job application with my CV meekly attached and apply to work in an establishment newsroom and someone in HR, or maybe even the editor-in-chief themselves, will Google me and find this piece and there we go, I’d have fucked my chances.

Then again, I think about my experience and profile in Singapore—all of which is also Google-able—and I figure my chances of working in an establishment ‘neutral’ newsroom are fucked already anyway. And I circle back to the same thought: I need to say what I feel needs to be said.

Somewhere along the way over these past 14 years I’ve developed a yearning for emotional and intellectual honesty—specifically from myself—because, more and more, I feel suppressed and stifled and mindfucked by oppressive legislation and political gaslighters. I’m traumatised and worn down and burnt out and I long for a time when I was, if not braver, at least less paranoid and anxious.

Am I a journalist? I started with this question, and as I followed it down the path I realised it isn’t just a simple question about a profession or career choice. It’s about all of it: The multitude of horrors around the world and how they’ve completely overwhelmed my ability to formulate adequate responses. My grief, shame and anger at the feeling of helplessness that hovers over me, and the exhaustion of having to fight against it and get out of the bed in the morning. My disillusionment and depression at the state of… well, everything. Nothing is all right and I can’t go about life and business as if they are.

I’m down at the moment, but this doesn’t mean I’m beat—if anything, I’ve demonstrated to myself over these past 14 years that I have a remarkable ability to get up again and again and again. And despite the glum, pessimistic mood of this piece I don’t intend to stop exercising the journalistic integrity—the fact-checking, the clarity, the ethics—I’ve learnt on the job over the years, regardless of whether I stay in the industry or not. It’s just that, in this period of exhaustion and overwhelm, I’m surveying the beaten up landscape of my life and discovering a shift in tectonic plates. I don’t yet know how this shift will redirect my flow, but it feels like something quite substantial has changed and I have to, once again, figure out how I want to put one foot in front of the other.

~ vibes ~

I listened to this song multiple times while writing this and it was comfortingly noisy.