‘They Can’t Kill Us All’ captures complexities of modern journalism
“They Can’t Kill Us All,” a new book by Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery, is a brief guide to many of the deaths that sparked Black Lives Matter and to many of the personalities that emerged around what Lowery has described as something better understood as an ideology than a movement. And I also think the book ought to be read as a primer about the many granular challenges involved in doing journalism today.
Reporting is easy to criticize from the outside, but one service Lowery does in “They Can’t Kill Us All” is to walk readers through precisely how he does his work.
He explains how he makes connections: In Missouri, for example, he had help from Chris King, the editor of an African-American weekly newspaper, who took on some of the same duties that a fixer might perform for a reporter who is stationed overseas. He acknowledges the inherent invasive nature of the job, the fact that reporting involves “showing up on what is either the best or the worst day of your life,” though he doesn’t note or explore the intriguing parallel between reporting and police work in that aspect of the job.
Lowery captures his own awkwardness when interviewing the families of the dead, “stammering through a preamble that is as much an apology for the fact that I’m in this person’s face asking questions at a time like this as it is a setup for the questions themselves. Can you tell me about Walter? What will you remember about him?” And he reminds readers of the strain of the job in recounting an incident where he was reprimanded for his tweets about the death of Walter Scott, who was shot by North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, whose trial is ongoing as I write these words.
“I was acting out, having a tantrum, because I didn’t want to get on a plane to South Carolina. I was tired,” Lowery writes. “The dead looked like my father, my younger brothers, and me. The way they were dehumanized by cable news talking heads stung me sharply, piercing the layer of emotional detachment I had learned to acquire since being thrust into the story in Ferguson.”
Critics of journalists who believe there is such a thing as perfect objectivity seem unlikely to pick up “They Can’t Kill Us All” in the first place, but I would be curious to know if such people could maintain the perfect control they demand while working at the same pace and under the same conditions of strain.
The book isn’t merely about Lowery’s personal practice of journalism; it captures many of the new factors influencing the profession.
Some of the questions are technical; the new tools of journalism that allow information to be distributed quickly and widely have their own constraints. Lowery reminds readers that he was at the McDonald’s where he was arrested because it was “the only spot within walking distance of the street where Mike Brown had been killed that had all three of the essentials required by a reporter on the road: bathrooms, Wi-Fi, and electrical outlets.”
The applications that allow reporters such as Lowery to record audio on their phones cut off a cellular connection, forcing a choice between capturing a complete recording and tweeting dispatches from an ongoing event. And the emergence of new tools, such as Snapchat and Periscope, provide new storytelling avenues for journalists that have to be incorporated into coverage plans.
These technologies also make it possible for people who are not professionals to do the work of journalism. Lowery points out that Emanuel Freeman, a rapper who lived near the scene of Mike Brown’s death, broke the news of Brown’s killing. The Ferguson Protester Newsletter, which grew to 21,000 subscribers, gave organizers such as Johnetta Elzie a tool to mobilize readers and to promote or criticize national news coverage. Live-streamers capture protest and rioting.
The impact wasn’t merely in the form of competition for mainstream reporters. As Lowery notes, “A St. Louis blogger took a picture of me interviewing some demonstrators at a massive downtown rally and published it in a piece that suggested I was ‘marching with the protesters.’ ”
“They Can’t Kill Us All” may not have been the place to do it, but a longitudinal exploration of how these factors influence mainstream journalism seems like a vital and important thing to keep an eye on.
The same is true for the demands and tensions Lowery identifies from ordinary citizens. How do reporters build and maintain trust in communities where people feel that their neighbors have been mischaracterized and their needs ignored by both the local and national press?
Lowery also is a sharp observer of the way journalism exists in a larger ecosystem, especially when it comes to reporting on the police. Their profiles of people killed by the police can be “used by the casual reader to decide if the tragic outcome that befell him or her could have happened to us, or … if this tragic fate was reserved for someone innately criminal who behaved in a way we never would.” In seeking balance in coverage, reporters can overcompensate. And it isn’t simply the presence of reporters that encourages people to come out and protest; protest can be a response to reporters’ representations of their communities.
I suspect “They Can’t Kill Us All” won’t satisfy those readers who would like to see journalism occupy a separate, inviolate sphere, uninfluenced by technology, social pressure or even simple physical exhaustion. But for the more realistic among us, “They Can’t Kill Us All” is a valuable testament to just how enmeshed journalism is in our civic fabric.