a teenager, worried about being the only boy in my neighborhood who had no girlfriend, I invented one: a name she wrote passionate love letters - with your left hand to change the lyrics - and I sent them to myself, always trying to stay out there misplaced, for negligence, for older people read them and take care of watering your content across the Arenal, the place where we lived.
walked in those years so self-absorbed, so high that I did not realize that my family and I had discovered. One day my grandfather, the old Alberto Ramos, I got off the tag with one of your phrase: "this guy as a liar," he told one of his buddies, "like it's going to be a journalist." My grandfather, a mountain man in which barely read and write his name, he had reason to know that fiction is a tool of the literature and journalism. So it was not intended to be the funny, but help me see what was best for me to, in his words, securing the future. A couple of years ago, a reporter had come to Arenal to cover a flood, and his story did not say how many victims left the disaster or how they called the river overflowed, but instead spoke in detail of a family of survivors who had improvised home in the treetops. A family which, of course, did not exist. The conclusion of my grandfather was logical: if the matter was to lie, I'd pick out a head advantage to this reporter and, therefore, could be a better journalist than he is.
Over time I realized that my lies of childhood and adolescence were in large part to the desire for events that attract attention people. Thankfully, at least as a journalist, I realized in time that reality could also dotarme of such stories. He said that the challenge of a good writer is not embellish or disfigure reality with false, but to discover how amazing it is inside. And being able to create good stories based on this reality, and sometimes seem flat. It has always been people who departs from this basic principle, especially before, when many reporters invented characters, situations and even news, with the guarantee of impunity that gave them poor communication in our global village. The slogan in those years seemed to be: "Do not let reality ruin your a good story. "
Some assumed, like my grandfather, that the tampering was not important, provided they were stirred with certain elements. Even thought - the ironies of life - that lying could be a useful tool for truth. It was felt that a poor man to invent a lie, because the poor exist. Or you create in the interview to a German who shaved peach juice was no sin, for after all the more believable character drama was living Caracas due to drought. **
Why lie some journalists? Why reality seems flat and want correct? Why hide the truth that hurts their interests and those of their employers? Why neglect? Physical clumsiness Why? Why a mixture of all these causes? Some think, as Mark Twain's Joker, that truth is so precious that should be saved. It does not take an expert to realize that many practicing in areas where there are more windows and mirrors, therefore, spend more time contemplating themselves than watching others. Do not listen to others is always an effective way to shut out the truth. We have brought, for example, those journalists who, according to Bill Kovach, select their sources with the sole purpose of expressing it really is just your own point of view, and then use a neutral voice to give overtones of objectivity. This - the author adds, is a form of deception. But there are other, less subtle. A few years ago we were moved to Colombia with the news of a family so poor Bogota ate stew of old newspapers. The fact was false, although we saw over and over again on television. Were not they supposed that the lack of communication was what created the right climate of impunity that allowed our ancestors to distort reality? Although the camera made us witnesses of this history, although we hear the testimony of the woman and saw the soup pot with the sad, fell into the trap. Why add to our poverty, which already is a tremendous drama, size lie so rough?
The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, in the book "The Five Senses of journalist," raises a hypothesis that could serve as an answer: after the entry of big capital to mass media, truth became a subordinate value to the interesting or what can be sold. "Today," Kapuscinski says, "the soldier of our work is not investigated in search of truth but to find sensational events that may arise between the headings of his environment."
In these times there is a tendency to become reality, even the most dismal in entertainment. In fact, the journalist Yamid Amat discontinued some years the programming of the channel, to announce publicly that he had what he called "spectacular images" earthquake in the coffee, the same one that caused nearly a thousand deaths and left about 200 thousand victims. So it's not without reason a warning that if Jesus Christ resurrected news but I would not be subject to a reality.
This effort to turn everything into entertainment is not only distasteful, but is a way of lying: it creates the impression that the counterweight of death is not life but the circus, stir-without any context, the sequin to the disaster, convince the unwary that has character and who screams who stars in an irreverent scandals is easy. That put before our eyes a carousel of massacres, mixing death hysteria with hysteria of goals, and then show a parade of scantily clad women, as if they think so we guarantee a happy ending, I find a way rather perverse to practice journalism. He conceals the people the true meaning of reality and, if I may, of truth. I remember now, for example, the case of Caracol TV journalist who went from one side to another with their cameras, and apparently nobody told him what were the limits of his own life and the rest of the country. That was an insufferable tease streap diary type told us how he slept, if you hurt your neck or calf, if he dreamed of apples or grapes, and not led us to the reality but we are prevented from reaching it, because it crossed as a hindrance in all situations which must show: singing a duet with popular musicians who interviewed, and got a spoon, so grotesque, the cook prepared a stew of La Guajira, and tested before the cameras. Its inclusion in the narrative story had no serious intentions, but it was a show Farandulera deprive us of knowing what was happening beyond their noses. That is a lie widespread in these times. **
Another lie is the belief that good journalism is only one who finds pot rot. In societies with a weak justice as the means are tempted to set himself up as judges. Certainly the work of supervision of public officials is an important duty. The trouble is to reduce the journalism that, forgetting that there are stories about popular culture: jugglers, bream, holidays, traditions. And where we left the life of ordinary people? We should stop the obsession with interesting and start thinking about what necessary. Good journalism should also be a possibility of building memory. I think a writer should make a commitment to telling the best possible use of their environment and their era. Its agenda should go beyond the news of the mass media: we must pursue the life that we do not want to tell the media, the people excluded by not having power or not being a victim of the tragedy.
During an interview I did, Javier Dario Restrepo raised several challenges to journalism that is being done today in Colombia and other Latin American countries. One is that journalism is stalled at present. No delves into the past for the context of the facts, nor are wondering what could happen in the future. There seems to be, said Restrepo, a contempt for all that is beyond the immediate. I remember when we got to this point he quoted John Tebbel, one of his favorite authors: "News is not what has already happened but what will happen."
few days before our meeting, Javier Darío had seen a TV news information about a new disaster caused by streams of Barranquilla, and while transmitting the news, she felt he was getting the same story last year the same the year before, the same as thirty years ago. That was, in fact, a chronic fretted traveling from one year to another with absolute effrontery, which just changed the names of the victims. Apart from the usual lamentations, recorded in the foreground to make them more cumbersome, there was one voice to say what should be done so that the streams do not continue killing people. Who do their part to prevent these calamities? Why have not fulfilled their responsibilities? When did they meet? In this talk
Javier Darío insisted that we have a sense of reality very limited. We wonder, as Shakira, where are the thieves, but never found out where we go if we continue in the hands of thieves we're showing. So he proposed to give more space to good narrative journalists, those who can reflect the substance through the atmosphere. I want to end my speech with one of the most interesting phrases I heard that afternoon Restrepo: "No truth will be complete until he is well told. We have been told a million times what is happening. Now the challenge is to begin to discover the possible. " Thank you very much.
· Chronicler of Colombia. He has written for magazines narrative journalism in Latin America, such as SoHo, the Malpensante and Black Label.
salcedoramos@gmail.com
Taken from newsletter Bolpress, Bolivia. ( http://www.bolpress.com/art.php?Cod=2006121405&PHPSESSID=92c466f868fb2c78ee81e9ed9786b52b )
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