Call Me A Journalist, Maybe.

“Are you a writer or something?” – Allison Van Doren to Rachel Armstrong in Nothing But The Truth (2008)

The confrontation.

I didn’t know I was going to be watching a movie about journalism. If I had, maybe I would have watched it sooner.

Nothing But The Truth, like most of the other movies with this theme, is about a reporter on a rough road. Unlike the other films on reporting I’ve watched, though, it has been the first to generate thoughts in my head that want to just spill over on paper. It’s not that I never pondered on the conflicts presented in Shattered Glass (2003), Blood Diamond (2006), The Killing Fields (1984), State of Play (2009), and so on, but this was the one film, a simple, non-award winning film at that, that made me want to share a few things with others.

The film explores the right of a journalist to not reveal his or her source. In college, I learned this from my Introduction to Development Journalism professor. It was one of those things we didn’t dwell on too much (libel just had more attention), but I did know that this right could be expunged in the face of national security. In the movie, Kate Beckinsale, who plays the role of the journalist Rachel Armstrong, writes an article exposing a CIA agent whose report on the lack of Venezuela’s involvement in an assassination attempt seemed to have been ignored when the US attacked the country. The story is explosive and the feds pressure her into giving up her source. But she doesn’t do it, despite the whole deal about national security. She ends up in jail and stays there for nearly a year, refusing to speak. As a viewer, I was stunned by her willpower to protect her important source, and her reverence for the principle. I thought then, Could a person really go that far to defend a principle? Wasn’t she serving her “own” interests in refusing to name this source, when it was a matter of national security? In the end, when it is finally revealed who the source is, we both understand, and don’t understand, what she did.

Most viewers may have considered the original source to be unreliable. This could have been the case, but  what the source said got our heroine thinking. So she poked around–and when she got another source to corroborate and the go from the editor, a thousand words later, she had her Pulitzer-nominating story. I think that it was being a sharp reporter that enabled her to write the story. If she had just shrugged off the info, thinking it was a joke–if she had not even posited it to be true, then the big story would never have made it out there. I believe what Beckinsale’s character possessed was curiosity–a heavy amount of curiosity, which, had she been without, would have made her unfitting to be called a journalist.

Once we learn who this source is, we are either touched, or filled with vehemence for the journalist and the source. We get to thinking, Armstrong chose to save that person’s family’s peace over her own? Didn’t her family need her? Honestly the whole drama about the family made me realize how inconvenient it is for both journalists and CIA agents to have one. It strengthened my [sweet] disposition of avoiding marriage in order for my journalism career to sprout and grow and blossom… And while this thought is disturbing, there is another: the thought that, perhaps, it wasn’t just about the families, but herself–that maybe, having taken the source’s information so seriously, her journalistic tactics would have been criticized, since, as I’d mentioned earlier, the source could have appeared unreliable to others.

Watching the film with my family was an ordinary experience. I have a feeling they considered the film’s story ludicrous, especially with the revelation of the source. I also feel that since they do not respect the media that much, they do not want me to be part of it. But, I want to write stories and let people be heard. I’d like to think that I can do that, despite my parents’ prejudices and my personality type. I’d like to think that I have enough of an inquisitive mind and wits to truly earn the title of a journalist someday, like the fictional Rachel Armstrong–only, without all the drama and jail/prison-time.

The need to belong.

“I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.” – Charles Bukowski

It’s no use being shy and infused with low self-esteem.

One tends to just feel sorry for one’s self and project an ineffective picture of a lady not bothered at all by the wave of inferiority being transmitted to her.

One tends to prolong eye contact with all things dispossessing a face, eyes, feelings, and perceptions.

One tends to be aloof. Indifferent, they say. One tends to think that one does not belong anywhere, that one could not belong anywhere because no one could possibly bear one’s idiosyncrasies.

And when one walks, one tends to bow down to the world, and walk quickly from one destination to the next, one’s shoes passing by sandals, boots, slippers, sneakers, heels, and, occasionally, bare, calloused feet. Being stepped on is common. Bumping against a stranger is a hazard (perhaps one had not been noticed). But it’s okay. It’s part of one’s life.

There is nobody.

One will just keep walking, trying to get to each destination, as the feelings of inferiority and shyness eat away the spirit of the individual.

——-

…Someday, though, perhaps some shoes, slightly dirtied and frayed, yet still decent (which had probably joined the traveler’s exhausting long walk), might pause in front of this person and force the person to look up, meet eyes, steal glances, crack smiles, exchange hellos… Until one finally found a person, a group of people, an eclectic selection of strangers, who would make her feel comfortable and alive and invincible all at once.

And she would think, There is a place for me after all. There is a place.