Angling Heartstrings

Most journalists I know personally cite many reasons for why they wanted to go into the field: They want their voices to be heard. They like the excitement. They saw the famous movie “All the President’s Men” and decided right then and there that they wanted to be the ruthless and pensive Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein. One idealistic aspiration for entering this career field, however, lies at the foundation of their career path – a desire to transform the world for the better.

Reporting is truly a powerful tool in causing change. As the Tom Stoppard quote at the top of my blog says, 

“…if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”

The news is where people find out about conflicts that affect the entire globe, and knowledge is the catalyst for change. Anderson Cooper said,

“A lot of compelling stories in the world aren’t being told, and the fact that people don’t know about them compounds the suffering.”

Through reporting alone we can educate and therefore make a difference. The angles we take in our reporting can have an greater affect on the readers’ urge to incite change, as well.

This piece from The New York Times is a prime example of how a different angle, a humanitarian angle, pulls at the heartstrings of its readers, even though they’ve likely read the same kind of story several other times.

When reading about natural disasters, war, or other horrific phenomenon that happen around the world, it’s difficult for most people to really register all the facts and statistics and number of dead, etc. It’s not until an event hits close to home that people really, truly care. So how do you make a tsunami that killed thousands in East Asia, or a bombing in the heart of Baghdad, affect the thoughts and emotions of people living in the Midwestern United States? You do it by putting a human face on the facts and statistics. 

Everyone knows that there’s perpetual conflict happening all around the Middle East. It seems there’s a new headline every day about a suicide bomber blowing up a building somewhere in Afghanistan, resulting in tens of civilian casualties. It’s been going on for decades now, and as sad as it is, humans become desensitized to this kind of news, glancing over the headline as though it were another annoying denture ad. I wish I could claim freedom from the guilt of this myself, but we’ve all done it. This story from The New York Times, however, caught my eye because it gave the same old story in a whole new way.

Mauricio Lima for The New York Times Bibi Hawa with daughters               

Behishta, 5, left, and Mursal, 7, and a son, Faisal, 6, at home in Kabul.

Ms. Hawa lost two daughters, Khorshid, 15, and Parwana, 11, in

a suicide bombing on Sept. 8.

Instead of simply reporting on the fact that a suicide bomber blew himself up in the middle of a street resulting in an uncertain number of casualties, the reporter tells the story through the lens of a family who lost two teenage daughters in the blast: how the girls’ other siblings desperately tried searching through the piles of severed and bloody limbs for their older sisters, how the mother found out, the grief of the father, and the nightmares of the shopkeeper who watched it all happen in front of his store.

It’s all fact, but it’s fact through a human lens. This article made me emotional, even though I’ve read so many articles and heard so many times on popular media outlets about suicide bombers blowing up streets.

This article brings close the stories of these beggar children who are literally risking their lives every time they go outside to play. In this way, it might bring people closer to wanting to stop this madness, if they can only see its impact on a human level. It brings people closer to wanting to save the world.