Why I won't be saving the world

There I was, sitting in my first-year University kitchen. It was the social hub, really; we lacked any shared space except the kitchen. A girl from an American university, staying for a semester, was sat with me.

“Stephen,” she said, for that is my name, “you’re pretty smart.”
I hate it when people say that to me. It doesn’t happen regularly or anything, but it has happened in the past. How are you supposed to respond to such a flattering accusation?

“Yes, I am”

This is too outrageously arrogant, even if you say it with as much irony as your voice can summon. Nobody will like you for it. I speak from naïve experience.

“Thank you”

It’s not quite as arrogant as outright agreeing, but I think there’s some implied agreement if you say just those two words. Almost as if what you’re really saying is “Thank you for noticing”. By and large, however, a “thank you” might be acceptable.

“Not really”

There’s a danger with this response. You can say it flippantly, and then people will see that arrogance bubbling under the surface. A sincere delivery, on the other hand, will generally make people reassure you: “oh, no, don’t be silly, you are smart”. In which case they might be reassuring you, or they might be saying it to shut you up. A worst case scenario is they think you’re denying your intelligence so they can prove they really mean it – in other words, what is known as ‘fishing for compliments’. And if you’ve dodged all those bullets, there’s a chance they might agree with your “not really” assessment.

“So people keep telling me”

This is my favoured response. There’s an element of self-deprecation, which I often like to use because I think it’s funny and slightly charming. After much use of the technique, however, I’m beginning to think nobody else believes the same. Alas.

I hesitated, pondering over exactly which phrase should flow from my mouth. As it happened, the American girl spoke quickly enough for my non-response to go unnoticed:

“Why are you doing journalism instead of something like saving the world?”

There’s few times in my life when I’ve been speechless. (One other memorable time was when I got a PlayStation for my birthday.) Truly, properly speechless. I’m usually good with words; I can usually fire my brain cells to produce a quip when confronted with the most mundane of sentences. This one question had me truly stumped. Confused and baffled enough to write this, roughly twenty-four hours later. (The exact time I wrote that sentence is 12:44:47 PM on Sunday, 20 March 2011.)

My brain was swimming with words and concepts that refused to be wrought into sentences, stubbornly incoherent. Eventually my mouth got tired of hanging open and demanded my brain pull something out of its depths, hoping against hope that it would a)make sense, and b)be clever.

“Who says journalism doesn’t save the world?” I countered. Brilliant! A masterstroke!

Then she went into her definition of ‘saving the world’, including things like that holy grail of go-to altruism, heroism and genius: fighting cancer. Well, I ask you! What sort of bonkers question is that to ask somebody? Before the sheer randomness of asking me such a question really hit me, I started to feel twinges of actual guilt. Am I being a lazy bastard? Should I quit the whole journalism degree thing and get set to work on biology, chemistry, virology and, erm, cancerology? Quit the student newspaper and join Amnesty International instead?

Maybe I am pretty lazy. I’ve always been like that with work, it was a common complaint of schoolteachers. “Yes, Stephen’s work is very good – but he’s not pushing himself!”

So the real question floated to my mind: is journalism a worthwhile pursuit of my talents? (I say ‘talents’, as a figure of speech rather than an arrogant assertion of Olympic lexical skill. Or at least that’s what I’m telling you.) I’ve questioned my choice of career before, many times. It’s hard not to when you hear about what utter bastards most journalists are, and those many instances of lies, deceit and treachery that seem to be the foundations of Fleet Street. But this was the first time I’d actively questioned whether I was being complacent and lazy.

Does that even matter? I’m not sure it does. I am sure a great number of people would like a job that they are good at and can do, all the time, to a competent level. I am not saying I am a good journalist, but I am saying that if I was, why would I want to do anything else? In journalism itself I could, should and might push myself by moving from reporting on missing dogs to doing investigative work uncovering corruption and things like that.

Even if I stick with more tame subject matter, I see no problem. Laziness has nothing to do with it. I’m of the opinion that everyone should seek out a job they love doing. You only live once, so why not grab life and do what you want to do? A job is essential for survival – pretty much, anyway – and thus if you find one that excites you, that you like, that you really want to do, then just do it. That’s how I feel about writing. I’d love to have a job writing. What’s the most stable job you can get writing? Journalism, I reckon. I’d love to be a novelist, but I’ve never finished a novel. Not even sure I could. And even then, imagine all the novels finished in a year. Imagine all the ones that get sent to publishers. Think of how many are accepted. Think of how many are then published and sold in good numbers. Then think of how many of those writers continue to write well-selling books. Absolutely bloody daunting.

Journalism, I like to think, is far more stable. You get hired onto a newspaper’s staff and away you go! Until you write “Black people should all be shot”, they’ll keep you on. Unless it’s the Daily Mail, where if you write that, they’re apt to give you a raise. Unfortunately, the journalism industry is suffering pretty badly right now. And I think that view of a newsroom is a rather naïve one anyway.

If I have established, then, that journalism is a good job for me, that leaves me to ponder selfishness. Is it, as my good American challenged, a worthwhile way to spend my time? I like it, and I think that liking a job is the best reason for a job. But is that selfish? Should I say to myself: Stephen, you love journalism. But people love their families, and they don’t love it when their relatives succumb to horrific deaths, like those caused by cancer – so why don’t you get your head out of your ass and save some lives?!

Science is interesting, parts of it fascinating. But I was never thrilled by it. Again, though, isn’t that just selfishness? I’m going to say no. Imagine I was a researcher in the field of cancerology. I’d much rather be a journalist, but my hitherto unearthed altruism has burst forth and compelled me to, ahem, ‘save the world’. There’s little progress – hey, it’s a tough field – but there is still some. I’m not enjoying my job, so I don’t give it my full effort, so my usefulness is diminished – hell, it might even be damaging.

Does that work? I hope so. Stick with a job you love, rather than one that people say you ‘should’ do.

There have been times where I’ve questioned if I actually want to do journalism. Hell, I would absolutely bloody love a career as a screenwriter – and these days, actually, it seems like a more stable career path than print journalism – but journalism first captured me. Perhaps I could do both. But there are moments, just little moments, that make me realise that I really should go into a career in journalism. Moments where doubts fly away and leave you thinking I Am Right.

One of those moments was the catalyst for the article – the American girl who questioned my vocational aspirations – but there’s another one.

I was sat in a meeting for the student newspaper, and we were waiting for the editor to show up and kick off the meeting. To pass the time the guy sat next to me struck up a conversation. I’d seen him around campus and I’d come away with the distinct impression that he was a pretentious arse. (I judge people like that a lot.) Let’s call him Prarse.

“Which section do you write for?” he asked.

“I do news.” I told him.

“Have you got anything in this next edition?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied, and then gave him a brief overview of whatever bullshit I’d been asked to stretch to a few hundred words.

“I do the opinion section – I’ve written a piece about the death penalty.”

“Oh right,” I said, feigning interest, “that sounds interesting.”

“It is. I really like writing Opinion, it’s much better than news.”

“Yeah?” I gently inquired, now actually curious as to why.

“Yeah, in Opinion you can just write what you feel like – you don’t have to bother with facts and stuff.”

Well I damn near exploded on the spot. I’m sure that, given some reflection, he wouldn’t be so dismissive of “facts and stuff”. But the fact is that in casual thought, he’s completely uninterested in reporting the truth to people. He just wants to spread the Gospel of Prarse. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Opinion section – and believe me, what he writes does not qualify – but you can’t just go shouting as loudly as you like to convince people. Even idiots deserve the facts of the matter. Otherwise we’re just in a sea of blogs.

That’s one of those reasons that made me realise I was built for journalism: given the choice, people should know what is going on and not what you think about it. Anybody who thinks differently shouldn’t be allowed near a keyboard.

Now Prarse’s utter stupidity is out of the way, let’s return to another point, that I made way back when I was first hit with the question: “Who says journalism doesn’t save lives?”

Sure, a lot of the time it might be finding out which celebrity likes to be sodomised by prostitutes wielding dildos, but there are times when journalism does a worthy job that saves people’s lives. By and large it won’t, I know. It often has to settle for lesser goals: exposing corruption of public officials, for example. Pah – so what if the President of the United States gets the CIA to break into his opponents’ offices? It’s not saving any lives.

Perhaps a journalist will find evidence that a police officer killed a man who was completely innocent. But who cares, right? The guy’s already dead – you’re not going to be saving any lives.

So what if The Sunday Times campaigned for years for a drug manufacturer to give monetary compensation to those afflicted with birth defects because of Thalidomide? You’re just giving people struggling with deformed limbs a lot of money that will help them immeasurably – but come on, it’s not saving any lives.

So clearly, all journalism is totally useless.

Well, except for those times when it can save people’s lives.

A tireless campaign to stop the government taking action that will endanger its citizens. Splashing the face of a murderer across every front page for weeks on end making it a bit more difficult for him to go out and get stab-happy. Uncovering the shoddy design flaws in an aeroplane before it falls out of the sky.

These aren’t complete fantasies. Any of them could easily appear as on just about any paper’s front page, helping to save lives.

I’m not saying journalism is a noble career. I’m not saying being a journalist saves more lives than being a paramedic. (Because it's not true even slightly.) I’m not saying being a journalist means a person will save anybody’s life. But it’s possible, and I’ll be damned before I stop defending it.

Besides, there is at least one journalist who can save the world: his name is Clark Kent.