Journalism took me beyond my biases
Take a step behind the scenes as we highlight some memorable moments from the Ottawa Citizen’s storied past. Janice Kennedy wrote features and columns for the newspaper, discovering along the way how good journalism can challenge our preconceived ideas.
Honestly, I was a bit of a wreck. That April morning in 1999 should have felt like any other work day, but I found myself driving to the Château Laurier in a state of combined jitters and excitement.
The well-worn journalistic armour I favoured — nonchalant shrug, vague world-weariness — was useless. About to interview the daunting woman who had long been one of my idols, how could I possibly be blasé?
Perhaps “idol” is too strong a word. But Germaine Greer was undeniably iconic, especially for a committed feminist like me. She had been a foundational force of the movement since 1970, when her controversial work, The Female Eunuch, catapulted her into a lifetime of fame and guaranteed visibility. Along with Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, she was one of the sisterhood’s “holy trinity.” I was more than a little intimidated.
Elegant in dove grey, she swept into the hotel dining room and sat down to talk about her newest book, The Whole Woman. Over the next hour, she displayed wit and towering intelligence, most of it meted out in well-rehearsed phrases, finely polished to fit neatly into a journalist’s tiny micro-recorder. She also revealed much of the person she was — melting most of my awestruck assumptions into a sad little puddle of disillusionment.
Greer was imperious, projecting a sense of entitlement and privilege, and betraying a meanness of spirit I found both surprising and disappointing in someone purporting to desire the full liberation of half the human race. Between bons mots and grand statements, she trashed Friedan and Steinem, expressed her distaste for “Canadian coffee,” had a waitress remove a glass she thought spotted, complained about carpeting in the Château lobby, and bristled as she described how hotel staff had mangled her name into “Miss Greet” and “Miss Green.” She also displayed a shocking ignorance of Canadian writers — shocking, because she was at the time a professor of English and comparative literature in England. She had, for instance, never heard of Alice Munro, internationally published and much honoured even then, and recipient since that time of the little trifle called the Nobel.
Greer even railed against the “wretched faithful” she’d once observed in a Russian church, because their “grovelling ” piety had interfered with her enjoyment of the choir.
I had been prepared for feminist war stories and sharp flashes of brilliance. I was not expecting this. Greer’s sharpness had all the charisma of broken glass.
What struck me was not just that she wasn’t a particularly nice person, because many celebrated achievers aren’t particularly nice. It was the large gap yawning uncomfortably between the imposing persona of Germaine Greer and the reality sitting across from me, someone whose shine didn’t come close to matching her public dazzle. She was missing facets, all kinds of them.
When I sat down to write the profile, I included everything, both light and dark, not because I was being iconoclastic, but because I was being honest. That was what I had encountered. And I reflected, not for the first time in my journalistic career, that presumptions can be maddeningly misleading things.
Especially when you head into an interview with them.
To be a journalist means to speak to people, ask questions, dig into responses. And, like all journalists, I certainly did my share of interviews over the years.
I interviewed people with some kind of celebrity: writers like Carol Shields, Frank McCourt, Maeve Binchy, June Callwood; entertainment figures as varied as Kiefer Sutherland, the McGarrigle sisters, hotshot impresario Garth Drabinsky; several Ottawa Senators and numerous politicians, including Jim Watson back when mayoralty was just a glint in his eye; activist intellectuals like scientist David Suzuki and activists with great souls like Sister Helen Prejean, who has campaigned tirelessly against capital punishment in the United States.
I also interviewed people who didn’t have celebrated names: spouses, parents and kids in the depths of grief; victims of sexual abuse, clerical and otherwise; refugees with histories that shook my faith in the world; people who restored that faith with the grace of their forgiveness after unimaginable crimes against them and their loved ones; people who aired and shared their joys and triumphs, their love and passions.
I was always grateful for those moments, for the privilege of being allowed into people’s deep and private spaces.
But very few interviews upended me, had me going in one way and coming out another. The Greer interview did that.
So did another, and it took place just a stone’s throw from the Château.
I went to interview Deb Grey at her Parliament Hill office. The Citizen was publishing a politics issue for the Sunday magazine section, and I was writing a story on the personal lives of politicians. Grey, the feisty member of Parliament from Alberta who had been a Reform party original and was by then a member of the Canadian Alliance, had agreed to sit down and open up.
An outspoken, partisan, deeply conservative voice in the House of Commons, Grey had earned her reputation for being a champion of the Canadian far right — far right, at least, for someone like me, a person of the leftish persuasion. Naturally, I couldn’t imagine sharing a single, solitary interest with her.
I was wrong. If the Greer experience had disarmed me with disillusionment, this one disarmed me with delight. Grey was a joy to meet.
The antithesis of Greer, she was warm, funny, self-deprecating and insightful. Explaining why she didn’t drink, she observed, “I get into enough mischief dead sober. I can’t imagine what I’d be like half-potted.” She described the kind of Scrabble she played, where there’s “blood on the table.” She talked about conquering her fear of flying and how she’d recently been able to help a young seatmate, a stranger, through her anxiety in the sky.
When I wrote the story, I painted Grey with my own strokes of discovery, details that went beyond the news shorthand often characterizing her as simply a fierce partisan of the right. I wanted to show that this face of conservatism was not at all dour, mean, forbidding. I had discovered someone who was rational, calming, compassionate and funny — preconceptions notwithstanding.
If you accept the unexpected as a journalist, you reap personal rewards. If you share it effectively, your readers do, too.
Challenges to my embedded notions weren’t always confined to people, either. For a feature on the anniversary of the Harper Lee classic, To Kill A Mockingbird, I spent time in Monroeville, Ala., Lee’s home and the small town that was the real-life battleground for her story of racism and prejudice. All it took was that one trip to sweep away any culturally implanted images I might have had of gracious living in the magnolia-scented Deep South. When I visited Ireland to write a commemorative piece about the 1845-49 famine, I sat down with scholars and historians who turned my simplistic version of the event — bad English versus good Irish — on its head. There were still heroes and villains, but they weren’t the ones I imagined, and there were a lot more characters crowding the grey areas.
It never hurts to embrace the unexpected, whether in people, places, ideas or issues. Was that what Shakespeare meant? That there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our preconstructed philosophies?
Good journalism provides facts, figures, quoted words, context. It goes behind the scenes and into areas that might otherwise have remained hidden, profiling people who might otherwise have remained unknown. It transports people into new worlds. But from time to time, it can also do something else.
It can nudge us out of our complacency, showing us angles and surfaces and hidden facets we didn’t even know were there. It can boot our biases out the door, shove our assumptions out the window. Good journalism can pick up one of our casually held articles of faith, some untested inclination toward admiration or antipathy — and test it.
At a Women in the Media conference many years ago, I heard June Callwood speak about the impossibility — and undesirability — of pulling yourself entirely out of a story, no matter how fair and even-handed you’re being. Stay true to your principles, she said. Journalism is a distinctly human endeavour, and, when you try to do it well, distinctly humanizing.
But there’s a corollary there I’m sure Callwood would have appreciated: Stay true, but be open. If you discover alternative angles to people and events, incorporate those discoveries into your stories. A willingness to discard preconceptions serves everyone well, on both sides of the keyboard.
I doubt that anyone has ever defined journalism as an act of transformative magic. But every now and then, that can be its effect as it shakes up comforting, and comfortably held, assumptions.
Put it this way. Left-leaning liberalism and unapologetic feminism will always remain a comfortable fit for me. But I really wouldn’t relish sitting down again for coffee with Germaine Greer, though Deb Grey would be fun. And as a deeply reluctant flyer choosing a seatmate, I’d take Grey over Greer in a heartbeat.
Surprise discoveries can be deeply satisfying. Especially when they hint at how much richer the world is without selfimposed boundaries.
Janice Kennedy grew up in Montreal and taught high school there for a number of years before entering journalism and joining the staff of The Gazette. She came to The Citizen in 1989 and, during her time at the paper, reported on news, wrote features and contributed columns, both for the editorial pages and magazine sections. For several years in the mid-1990s, she was The Citizen’s theatre critic. She retired in 2008 but continued to write an editorial page column for five years after that. She lives in Ottawa.