We can handle the truth
Text of a speech I gave at the 53rd Annual Scripps Dinner at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada.
Thank you. It’s good to be in Nevada. I’ve spent all day working on my pronunciation of that. I’m very honored you’d have me speak tonight, and I want to thank the University, Dean Stavitsky and everyone at Scripps-Howard for the generosity and love they’ve shown me over the past year.
I am Stephen Stirling, and I’m a data reporter at NJ Advance Media in New Jersey. I was tempted to use this time to talk about my work, about how to navigate this industry, about how to produce meaningful enterprise reporting in a society where character count matters.
There’s time for that. There will be a Q&A after this session and I’ll be available to anyone who has questions or is seeking guidance after we’re done here, be it in the halls or via email, Twitter or what have you. Many of you are aspiring journalists, so if you have questions, ask them. I’m a product of the journalists who took the time to answer mine and show me the way, so it’s part of my duty to pay that forward.
Instead, this talk is about the truth. One of my mentors was the encyclopedic muckraking legend Wayne Barrett, who died in January after tormenting those who had power and lifting those who did not for more than 40 years. He liked to say that journalists are the only people who are paid to tell the truth.
That’s always made sense to me. And yet, with the ascent of now president President Donald J. Trump, it seems muddier than ever. But was finding, seeing, and reporting the truth ever really easy? It wasn’t for me; it still isn’t. I suspect it won’t be for you either. This talk is about my journey as a journalist and a human being…about my evolving relationship with myself, with my career, and with the truth. My hope is that some aspect of my journey may help you in navigating yours.
Perhaps you’ve seen the New York Times’ new marketing campaign. It’s centered around the idea that “the truth is hard.” Hard to find. Hard to know. Now more important than ever.
I didn’t need any advertising taglines for this to strike a chord. The truth is hard, period.
I spent half my life actively running from the truth, and it almost killed me. Because the truth doesn’t change. How we approach it, accept it or avoid it does though, and what path we take can have grave consequences or unparalleled rewards. Realizing this has not only kept me alive, but made me a better person and a better journalist.
When I got out of college in 2006, I thought I had the world by the balls. I was a talented writer and driven when I wanted to be, two things I’d ridden to an investigative reporting internship at the Village Voice with Wayne and another with the New York Daily News.
I watched the NYPD roll the bloodied body of a grandmother out from under a city bus. I cold-called Al Sharpton (whose number I still keep in my phone to this day, as a trophy). I’d investigated 9/11, and was happy to stare down any truther who dared tell me what really happened at 7 World Trade Center.
People told me I was good. For one of the first times in my life, I had confidence and purpose. I thought I’d seen some shit. I thought I knew some shit.
The biggest mistake of my career was thinking that. Because I didn’t know anything. In the grand scheme of things, I still don’t, and that’s ok. But it wasn’t then.
I needed to present that bravado of being the authority on everything because I thought that’s what journalists did. They know the truth and speak it. I believed in the power of journalism to do good in this world more fiercely than anything I had to that point. I still do.
But then, it was more important that I’d found my identity, and I was going to be damned if you were going to take it from me.
Really, it was just a good mask. I didn’t have the slightest clue who I was. Who does at 22? I was using my work to build the person I thought I should be. In reality, I was just running. Running from my problems, running from my fears, running from the truth. I did that for eight more years, and it didn’t end well.
Let me paint a picture of my average day three years ago.
I’d generally show up to work at the Newark Star-Ledger two to three hours late. By the time I got to the parking garage, I’d be shaking. So I’d reach into the back of my car and fumble around the some 20 to 30 mostly empty vodka bottles stuffed under the front seat until I found one that wasn’t empty. There would always be one, because you see I’d never finish a bottle, because I didn’t have a drinking problem.
Once I found it, I’d finish it in an effort to calm my spastic nerves, jittering from the beginning effects of withdrawal. Then the makeup routine began. Brush the hair, eat some mints, put in eye drops in a feeble attempt to look less like I was a recently infected cast member of the Walking Dead. And then I’d go face the day.
My presence, at this point, wasn’t much more than that. I needed to give the front of a working journalist but nothing more. At this point, I wasn’t even doing a good job at that.
I was living for 6 p.m. That’s when I could leave the office for one of the 7 or 8 liquor stores I visited regularly on the drive from Newark to New York City where I lived. I didn’t have a drinking problem, but I didn’t want the same clerk to see me twice in one week.
The one that sticks in my memory most viscerally was the bodega about two blocks from my office. It was the only store in a 3 block radius, and almost certainly didn’t have a valid liquor license. They sold mostly half pint and pint bottles, which did me no good, but had fifth of dusty Smirnoff on the top shelf, cooking under the lights just below the ceiling.
If you don’t know what a fifth of vodka is, it’s the equivalent of your standard wine bottle or 16.93 shots. I knew this then because I was a rational adult in control, and didn’t have a drinking problem.
I’d buy one, go back to my car and pour as much as I could into an empty water bottle I’d saved from work (1.25 pints). Typically I’d spill some on the floor, because my hands were shaking pretty violently by this point. I’d tuck the bottle under the seat with the others and take a big gulp.
I’d have to wait for my body to begin processing it, and generally fighting it’s desire to vomit everything I’d just ingested, but soon I’d begin to feel somewhat close to normal and could begin my drive home.
Sometimes, if I got stuck in traffic, I’d hear all the bottles clink together every time I applied the brakes, like some kind of haunting chorus. Gas, brake, clink. Gas, brake, clink. I’d think about suicide a lot on nights like this. I didn’t see any other way out.
I’d finish at least a pint by the time I parked. I’d fill up my bottle again, leaving a shot or two because, after all, I’m not a monster, and head to my apartment.
By this point, I was drinking in front of my wife, who lived with me and our two cats in a 400-square foot studio apartment. So I’d walk in and place the bottle down on the coffee table. In one of our recent fights, she’d said she’d be more comfortable with me drinking in front of her instead of all the lies I’d been telling for 5 years. So I took her at her word. It was like a powerfully sad game of chicken.
Imagine living with your partner for 8 years, having just been married the summer before, and watching him or her slowly kill themselves before your eyes, hollowing out into a husk of a person you fell in love with. The tension that creates in a one-room apartment is immense. It took a lot of vodka to ignore.
Eventually, I’d run out to the bodega across the street and get a snack and a couple of tall boys. I’d chug them in the stairwell because I didn’t want my wife to know I was drinking that much.
I’d pretty much stay quiet watching TV on the other side of the couch, hoping that our semi-weekly blowout fight over my drinking wasn’t going to occur that night. If it did, I’d return to my tried and true practice of emotional abuse, blaming everything on her until she broke down in tears. If she cried, I won.
Most nights, I couldn’t bear to look her in the eyes. I’d been to the hospital several times, nearly choked on my own vomit in my sleep and my eyes had become unfocused late in the night, wandering aimlessly as I said goodnight to my wife. It terrified her.
That was my truth three years ago, and for many years before that. I am and an alcoholic and an addict. I suffer from depression. I had a world of issues and regrets I’d never sorted through — my brother’s cancer diagnosis, my parent’s divorce, and the path of destruction my alcohol-fueled psychosis had left in its wake.
A few weeks later she left, forcing me to confront that for the first time. And let me tell you, it was fucking hard.
I’m forever grateful that I did, though. Exhausted and beaten, I laid down my pride and accepted help. On April 19, 2014 I had my last drink.
I tell this story because I see parallels to the nature of truth and trust in this country as it pertains to the press. The truth is hard, but that’s just as important for the people communicating the news as those who would receive it. When I accepted that for myself, I had stable footing in my career and marriage for the first time in my life. And it’s a lot easier to climb a mountain sure-footed than not.
The truth is unyielding, unbreakable, unending. But so often it can be distorted when viewed through the prism of fear.
I was afraid of myself, afraid of the world. I had no idea who I was but was sure it was terrible. I rode my fears to the gates of hell, until I had become every bit the selfish fraud I was so terrified people would think I was.
Fear, though so often a mirage, is as powerful as you let it be and, unhinged, can destroy anyone or anything. It nearly killed me.
The truth, on the other hand, is never ideal. But it’s stable and tangible. When I accepted the truth about my addiction, I began to understand myself and get comfortable in my own skin for the first time in my life.
I began to understand my own flaws and biases, and that, with work, I could change them. You can’t change truth, or reality, in the moment as you’re living it. But with work the truth is malleable over time. What’s reality today doesn’t have to be tomorrow.
This has all made me a better human being. I’m happy to say, my wife and I are still together, have bought a house together and have a happy, healthy 16-month-old named Lucas who has never seen me drink or use drugs. Life is good.
But it’s also made me a better journalist.
It’s allowed me to accept that I don’t know everything, or much of anything really. So often I was so obsessed with presenting the front that I was an authority on any topic in my writing that it obscured me from the fact that my job is to talk to people that who know more than me and communicate that clearly. I’m not required to be a repository of expertise, but if I’m lucky, and continue to listen, I can be.
I also was so adamant about maintaining objectivity that I rejected the notion that I had biases, which is ludicrous. I do. Everyone in this room does. Let me give you some examples.
You may not have noticed this, but I’m a tall, white man. And a little known fact is that tall white men have it pretty good in the United States. I was brought up well. I was taught to love others and cherish our differences, to learn from them and evolve as a result of understanding them.
But a lifetime of not experiencing the friction that a woman or a black man do on a daily basis often made me blind to their struggle, and to the generalizations I had developed simply by living in a society where institutional racism and sexism runs rampant.
In my sobriety, I’ve caught myself reaching to check my wallet when a black man got on the elevator with me. What?! What is that? White guilt for days! I know that’s insane and horrendous, but I still did it for some reason.
I work on a data team with two women. They’re absolutely brilliant. But I’ve caught myself in situations where I’m sitting there going “Well actually, Erin, let me mansplain this basic concept of journalism for you.” I want to die.
What about in my reporting? I’ve written a lot about climate science, and for years the idea that people could reject any element of global warming’s existence was infuriating to me. So much so, that I basically stopped listening. That’s a terrible precedent for any reporter to set.
Does that mean we should be paying attention to the Jim Inhofes of the world, chucking snowballs through the halls of Congress? Of course not. But climate science is a vast and complex universe. And while some concepts of climate change have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, not every assertion from every peer-reviewed study is as ironclad as the basic concepts. Not even close.
Just last night, I had dinner with Professor Paul Mitchell, a black man, and fumbled over my words as I tried to say I was surprised people weren’t paying attention to the heroin epidemic despite it spreading to the suburbs in New Jersey, which are largely white. But why? Fear, plain and simple. I was afraid he’d judge me.
The truth is the opioid epidemic began making headlines in this country, began being treated with compassion decades after heroin and crack cocaine devastated African Americans, who were largely treated as criminals not victims of a disease, and thrown in jail on sentences we think of as unconscionable in this era.
But that’s not my fault. It shouldn’t prevent me from having a conversation with another human being, regardless of their race, age, gender or sexual orientation.
I’m not proud of any of this, but I’m happy to tell you about it. I still struggle with my biases. But today I can recognize that I have flaws, that I have biases, and that’s ok. Recognizing that allows me to fight against them every day in hopes of being better tomorrow.
And perhaps more importantly, being comfortable with myself allows me to have empathy for others. It allows me to be ok with not understanding something. It makes it more difficult for people to pull the wool over my eyes. It gives me the courage to question authority where it’s needed.
Sure enough, that pays dividends. Today I have an active role in leadership in my newsroom, a result of the trust I’ve built. I’m doing meaningful work that I can confidently say makes a difference in the lives of my readers. When I can’t do something I ask for help. I’ve learned Javscript, Python and how to do math with satellite imagery to identify threats of forest fires.
I’m currently building a coalition of journalists and programmers to help unlock some of the datasets the state of New Jersey has shielded from the public for years.
And I’m able to do this because I stopped running from the truth.
So how does this apply to our news ecosystem? Well, if you haven’t noticed, fear is so hot right now. And that has led to a golden age for political propaganda in this country. People are disaffected with politics. They are genuinely afraid of what’s happening in this country. The President has made the media the enemy and introduced fake news into the lexicon.
Some of this is manufactured, but not all of it.
The truth is hard and our jobs communicating it are not easy in this environment. Sometimes the truth requires defiance, and that takes courage we must muster on a daily basis, even in the face of detractors who would twist our words to further their own agendas.
What we do is so vital. In the last year alone, journalists revealed billions of dollars in potentially illicit financial shuffling in the Panama Papers, leading to at least 150 investigations in 79 countries. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution uncovered a broken medical board system that allowed doctors disciplined in sexual abuse cases to keep their licenses. In the past six months, reporters in my newsroom have produced work that has prompted an FBI investigation, led to class action lawsuits targeting faulty products sold to our nation’s schools, revealed potential human trafficking on a high school basketball team, forced politicians to resign in disgrace and shown that more than $1 billion in taxpayer money collected to fix our state’s archaic 911 system has been used instead to fill budget holes.
What we do is important, and you should be proud and excited to be pursuing this at a time when the industry is invigorated by monumental change and unrest.
But the truth is also hard because of the threat we pose to ourselves. The President and other politicians have seen success in using our failings against us, and are thirsty to fight a long war with the media, in hopes of turning us into a scapegoat for the polarizing unrest that bubbles around us.
It’s not our job to engage in a war with the president or anyone else. It’s not us-vs-them and it’s dangerous to think that way. Our job is to communicate the truth, to shed light on darkness and give voice to the voiceless. It has never changed and it has never failed in the existence of our union.
I keep a the funeral card for Wayne Barrett tacked up on my desk. On the back is another of his quotes: “Our credo must be the exposure of the plunderers, the steerers, the wirepullers, the bosses, the brokers, the campaign giver and takers … So I say: Stew percolate, pester, track, burrow, besiege, confront, damage, level, care.”
We live in a free society, but injustice and greed always lurk.
We must seek it out and expose it. But just as importantly, we must make sure we do so with our feet firmly planted foundation of truth, and not a an illusionary reality propelled by our own fears and those that swirl around us.
So as you move on in your life, your careers, my advice to you is this. Accept yourself. Accept the imperfection of reality. Make peace with your flaws and fears. Grow.
The truth is hard. But we must not fear things because they are hard. We must stand hard in the face of fear. Thank you.