Objectivity: The gray area

I once got into a heated debate with a much-older colleague at one of the newspapers I used to work for. It was during a training session about new ethics standards that were being crafted by the parent corporation.

I can't recall exactly how the debate got started, but I do know that it centered about the concept of "objectivity."

Even non-journalists know this concept: That it is a journalist's job to be un-biased in our reporting and writing.

You might be asking, how could there be any debate over that issue?

Here's how: Objectivity is not absolute. Anyone who believes otherwise is naive.

Journalists are human beings. Human beings have experiences in life that shape their attitudes. Those experiences make it impossible for us to be purely objective about certain issues.

Which is why -- and this is where the debate came in when I was younger -- I believe that some stories are best told by someone who can relate to them.

It turns out, I'm not alone in believing that. Check out this online chat transcript by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post. He's one of the country's premier feature writers, and he recently penned a weekend magazine article about the tragic trend of parents forgetting their babies in hot cars.

The article is horror-inducing, can't-put-down good. It's compelling and compassionate and -- most importantly -- addresses a question that most people are afraid to even consider. Could this happen to me?

Now, Weingarten is an amazing writer. I'm not sure I've ever read something of his that didn't leave a mark. But this one? This one goes farther. Within two paragraphs, I was sick to my stomach and I had tears in my eyes. I almost couldn't finish reading.

I discovered later, while reading his online chat about the story, why he was able to write this story with such emotion.

Weingarten once forgot his child in his car.

Yeah. Holy crap. Take a minute to absorb that, and then go back and read the story again.

Luckily, his story had a happy ending. His daughter made a noise as he was getting out, reminding him she was there. After nearly throwing up with horror, he got back in his car and drove her to daycare. He's haunted by it still today.

Read this passage from his chat:

When the news broke last summer about the death of Chase Harrison, I knew I had to write this story, whether I really wanted to or not. Like actors, writers know that genuine emotion is a valuable asset to draw on, not one that you lightly discard. If this article seemed to be presented with more restraint than some of my other magazine cover stories, it is probably because this was the end result of a writer fighting for a sense of control.

I did not tell my wife about that moment in the parking lot, not for years, not until half a year ago when I began working on this story and needed to explain why it was keeping me awake nights. And I didn't tell Molly about it until just a couple of months ago; oddly, I found that 25 years after the day no harm was done, I couldn't look her in the eye.

Wow...

According to former colleague with whom I got into that heated debate, weingarten never should have been allowed to tackle that article. He couldn't possibly have been OBJECTIVE in his coverage of a man who was charged with a crime for leaving his son in a hot car, she would have argued. He couldn't possibly tell both sides of the story fairly because he would be too understanding of the parent who have done this awful thing.

In my opinion, his understanding is exactly why he was the best person to tackle this story.

As a society, we tend to take a black-and-white approach to things that scare us. Things are right or wrong. Guilty or innocent. And as more and more parents have done this -- forgotten a sleeping baby in a hot car -- our society and court systems have dealt with this horrible trend by deciding that parents who do this must be horrible, neglective. They should be charged and punished.

Because really.... how could any decent parent FORGET his child in a hot car, leaving him to die?

Weingarten knows how easy it could happen. And his own horror over that near-tragedy in his life allowed him to delve into this story in a way that the rest of us have been afraid to do.

Why are we afraid? Because deep down, maybe we know the answer; that maybe, just maybe, tragedies like this happen to really good parents.

We don't want to think that. We don't want to have to realize that maybe even WE could someday do this.

Here's the thing I've come to learn in my 15 years as a writer: Some subjects are so difficult, so horrifying, that objectivity becomes an excuse for avoiding questions that we don't really want to think about.

Sometimes, the only people who can ask those questions are the people who already know the answers.