Are journalists too reluctant to doubt and want to shed light on gray areas of their work? By hiding behind the facts, as the North American tradition of journalistic objectivity dictates, have they forgotten where they look at the world from?
The interview could have taken place almost entirely in the form of questions bouncing from one person to the next. His most recent book, Trouble the waters, appears this week, and Frédérick Lavoie admits that he is looking for more answers than he finds. And it is precisely this approach that becomes its heart and keeps us in its pages.
Having to deliver a series of reports on issues related to water in Bangladesh, the journalist-writer goes there thanks to a generous grant, supposed to simplify his life. Over the course of his meetings, his uncertainties about the accuracy of the representations he offers in his articles take on more and more space. He then understands that he will not write “one of those beautiful big books clean like the dawns of June”, as he puts it.
He therefore invites us to let go of “the monopoly of interpretation” that the journalist has behind his keyboard. However, it is not an easy thing, even for him, who has never hidden the fact that reporting is sometimes done gropingly: “All my books are already a bit like that: is it good? what is happening ? » he remarks in an interview.
A completely different book was born than the one he had envisaged. Instead of taming the waters, he knowingly disturbs them. Rather than offering certainties, he sets out to encounter “the inconstant, the incongruous and the insoluble, not as wild data to be tamed and caged.” […]but as the promise of new knowledge,” he writes.
His “hesitant stories”, as he calls them, occupy the first 227 pages of his fifth book on reality. They are punctuated by doubts as the action unfolds before him, concrete examples that he dissects. For example, when he visits floating schools, presented as solutions to school absences during floods. He says he is incapable of feeling satisfied with this “perfect little report”, especially since it is “turnkey”, since it is the NGO itself which transports and accompanies it. In a camp for newly arrived Rohingya refugees, he wonders what the limit of acceptable behavior towards a traumatized person is, “in the name of need to tell “.
Here, it is the way in which international information is produced today that he criticizes. We too often go in search of a “self-fulfilling report,” he says: “The journalistic reality is that you already have to know what you are going to do before you even arrive on the ground and meet the first person. »
It is also because it is “sometimes not possible to establish the facts in an undeniable manner” that we must delve into the insoluble rather than dismiss it. He reports in particular that, like people in several other regions of the world, Bangladeshis do not necessarily know their exact age. A detail, perhaps, but one that is likely to disconcert a press boss.
To be situated
The second part of Trouble the waters is presented more in the form of an essay where intellectual reflection occupies more space. Citing the thoughts of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and Bruno Latour, he then shows how the “existential crises” of other disciplines, especially anthropology, can fuel journalism today.
We learn to doubt what people tell us, but never ourselves. If you don’t ask questions about “who I am”, you cannot know what determines your outlook and your encounters.
It is not his privileged position that Lavoie discovers in these pages. He already knew this one. Rather, it highlights the fact that we can “situate ourselves”, that we do not observe “reality from nowhere in particular”, if only for our allegiance to our audience and “because ‘we were born somewhere’.
“I’m not saying that everything should be written with “I”,” he explains. This pronoun is nevertheless relevant on certain occasions, even in information. “We learn to doubt what people tell us, but never ourselves. If you don’t ask questions about “who I am”, you can’t know what determines your outlook and your encounters,” he emphasizes.
He therefore takes to task this “almost caricatured” obsession of news journalists not to use the first person singular, to the point of bordering on “ridiculousness”. He gives the example of The Press, who had commissioned a more personal story from him on COVID-19 in India, which had almost cost his in-laws their lives, while he struggled to find them hospital beds and oxygen. “To tell this family ordeal in which I was one of the actors, it would have been preferable for me to refer to myself as the author of these lines », he relates in an interview and in his book.
Where does this imperative of distance come from? We must move away from “passions and states of mind”, Walter Lippmann essentially professed in the last century, as Lavoie recalls. A quasi-scientific vision of the discipline, but a journalism which finds itself “quickly caught off guard in the face of modes of existence functioning according to other scales of value and other codes than those he wanted to believe universal », he writes.
However, the discipline has long accepted that the creator of information is more than a simple spectator, since it sometimes proclaims itself the fourth power, sometimes the watchdog, or, in any case, does not hide to want to change certain things.
Are we just wary of change? Rather pusillanimous, too fearful in the face of responsibility, Frédérick would probably say, if I had thought – sorry “if the journalist had thought” – of this word in time to suggest it to her. For him, this questioning is a real responsibility, a problem of ethics and professionalism, he underlines: “Our job is to represent reality and therefore what can I do to arrive at a better representation ? »
A frank, dense, intelligent book, which has the power to support both practitioners and anyone ready to transform their discomfort with concrete convictions into something more fruitful.