New Yorker in the dock, take II, or, How to accuse indigenous people of awful things (without really trying?)

How do you know if the truth is truly true?

Yeah, you read that right. But first, a background note or two:

Rhonda Shearer, who runs the watchdog group I referred to in my earlier post, brings up some good points in her comment. First: my own error. Shearer didn’t send 40 anthropologists to New Guinea (which is good, because I was about to hit her up for some funding). She and her organization sent some and then talked with others.

Second, apparently Forbes is wrong. Forbes said the guy in the lawsuit told Shearer’s group, at some point, that the information the New Yorker printed is true. Shearer says Forbes has this wrong and “is fixing it.” She also says “all interviews were conducted in English.”

I’m not sure what the language of the interviews has to do with it? Rhonda, maybe you can clarify? Is the idea that he didn’t know what his words had been translated into, and never translated back, or…? (And while we’re at it: seriously, the New Yorker is renowned for its fact-checking department. They must have done some fact-checking. Any idea what it was, and why it wasn’t (in your estimation) up to snuff?)

Third, Shearer says, “Bottom line–New Yorker went to press accusing indigenous people –who they named –of crimes they did not commit–rape, murder, theft–without even attempting to contact them to give them an opportunity to respond before publication. Diamond or The New Yorker had no idea if the people they mentioned were real people or if the charges of criminality were real…this is just plain wrong.”

Now this is the part that gets me fired up. Not in the “I have it in for/I will defend to the death the New Yorker” kind of way. I’m not really all that worked up about the lawsuit, but I do get worked up about the bigger issues Shearer raises: What is the responsibility of a journalist who gathers information in a culture and a language he doesn’t understand, and then uses it elsewhere?

In the Age Before the Internet (you know, BC), foreign correspondents interviewed people who never saw the final product. Today, that possibility (or perhaps, luxury?) has disappeared. My own work from Africa reminds me of this all the time: when I did a piece on a Sierra Leonean fashion designer, the online comments section was filled with congratulations to her from people who knew her. Which means they also would’ve known if I was wrong, bullshitting, or otherwise falling down on the job.

At the same time, journalists have a job to do: they have to take information, connect it to other information gathered from other sources, and put that in a context that reveals something important. That can get us into trouble. But not trouble we’re not used to. Years ago, at a journalism conference, I heard one award-bedazzled reporter say that she always tells profile subjects, “We will do this together, but the final product will not be your story. It will be my version of your story.” That seems wise.

The relative questions of interpretive lenses are clearly not the point of Shearer’s group’s suit; they allege basic errors of (big) facts. But the questions the allegations raise are bigger than a lawsuit. When Kuwimb–the lawyer-friend in my earlier post–says that the stories the New Yorker reprinted “stories were not serious narrative,” there’s a bigger point here: that truth is absolute, even if its expression is culturally relative.

That’s a point worth remember for all of us who work abroad. Our responsibility is not simply to get the story, but to get enough of the culture to understand whether the pieces of the story we have in our notebooks hold up. Which is, as anyone who’s tried to do it before will tell you, no small or easy task.

I’d love to hear from those of you who have worked abroad–as journalists or in other professions–how you handle this dilemma, parsing whether something someone told you is “truly true.”

ADDENDUM: I haven’t read Shearer’s group’s report, but you can find it here. Among the issues she tells me it raises is that subjects’ real names were used in the articles, which might be dangerous for them. This is, of course, the constant dilemma for journalists working in foreign countries…I won’t wade into it, since I’m totally uninformed on Papua New Guinea and the lawsuit beyond what I’ve just shared, but the safety of our subjects, while ever-present in most foreign correspondents’ minds, is certainly worthy of repeated reminders.