Leandro Albani
“Journalism is the splendour of beauty and the uncertainty of the unknown. It is the purity of the wind and the bravura of hidden waters.”
I sometimes think of journalists as ascetics: people who renounce everything and walk a path of sacrifice for their beliefs, which, in this case, is our chosen profession. This is not to say that these sacrifices imply a tortuous life or rivers of tears. Quite the contrary: the construction of a chronicle or a report implies a pleasure that, in my case, turns into a smile when I put the finishing touch and I am satisfied with the work. No more and no less than that.
When I was 13 or 14 years old I went with two friends to Laguna de Gómez, in Junín. Weekend in a tent, first beers and cigars, chats that got lost between dusk and dawn, cool mornings and mates.
When I got to the lagoon I was surprised how difficult it was to see where the far shore was. When I got in and started walking in the brown water (and on that muddy, sticky ground that shocks so many), I didn’t think I was going to walk and walk without feeling that at some point I was approaching the depth. The lagoon, known for its silverside fishing, had a flat bottom without too many irregularities. Just a few centimetres that promised a descent that after a few steps was discarded.
At that time I was already going to the Paraná [River] with part of my family: my grandfather, uncles, my brother, my cousins and some others who always joined in. Fishing was (and sometimes still is) what brought us together in Ramallo or San Nicolás. For me, the trips to the Paraná became, in a very short time, a crossing to the island (although there are many, it is always said in the singular). The crossing was complete: spend the night, wait patiently for a dorado or a surubí to hook (or, depending on the season, try to catch a boga after fighting its small mouth), or pray that the patí would hook a dorado or a surubí (or, depending on the season, try to catch a boga after fighting its small mouth); or praying that the hooked patí is big so that it ends up on the grill), listening to the tales of my grandfather Emilio and my uncle Mario, and imagining those crazy stories that they told us kids where they mixed flying saucers, “truculent” expeditions to the Carcarañá river, trapped fish of such huge and impossible sizes and some monster that when they were young surprised them from the catatombs of the Paraná. Always the river in their stories.
“I will keep it short, I will say it fast and I will say it clear: I do not believe that journalism is a lesser craft, a kind of low-voltage writing to which broken, second-hand creativity can be applied.”
(Leila Guerriero, in the book Frutos extraños)
The Paraná: unbounded brown tongues, tiring on its surface but uncontrolled and dangerous in its depths. Depths that when imagined can arouse, at the same time, the most genuine fear and the most hallucinating fascination. The Paraná: that during the day is warm sunshine and sweet breeze, and at night, while it follows its pleasurable course, at any moment it can transform into a storm that confirms that human beings are pure fragility and madness.
Journalism is like the Paraná (or, rather, the journalism I like and defend). It is the splendour of beauty and the uncertainty of the unknown. It is the purity of the wind and the bravura of the hidden waters. It is pure history, like that which crosses the Paraná. A story made up of thousands of other stories, lived and told by men and women on foot, and told by the river itself in its territorial and aquatic immensity.
Journalism is not a flat and safe bottom, it is discovery in the midst of the storm, it is a current that takes us to the depths of history. To reach it, we have to go up a gentle river (which at times seems monotonous and tiring, but which is beautiful and luminous), but which at any moment summons its fury and sends us crashing hard into a ravine. Overcoming this maddening storm is what every good journalist should do.
In February 2023, journalist Fréderike Geerdink published the article ‘The Alevi community: double victim in the earthquake disaster’. In the text, the reporter from the Netherlands, who has an in-depth knowledge of the Kurdish question, referred to the two almost simultaneous earthquakes that had their epicentres in south-eastern Turkey and also had repercussions in northern Syria, leaving thousands dead.
Geerdink said that after the earthquakes, the Turkish state distributed Islamic children’s books to the Alevi refugee community. The Alevis are mostly Kurds and have their main presence in the Dersim region, which has always been repressed by Ankara because of their stance against the state and in defence of their cultural and political rights. Alevism is a syncretic belief that has Shiite Muslim influence in its rites and its roots are pre-Islamic. However, many Alevis also disavow being linked to Islam. Among its characteristics is the central role played by women in society.
Reflecting on this, Geerdink wrote that this small story, published by a small Alevi news agency in Turkey, made her realise, once again, that “in times of extreme tragedy slow journalism is very necessary to really understand all the dynamics”. To this, the journalist added: “It is logical that fast and intense news journalism is accelerated in these times. But when the news is so big and devastating, the risk is that the ‘small’ news that doesn’t seem so important gets hidden.”
Geerdink reflected that such news for the Alevi community does not need much explanation, because they understand the context and the importance of what happened. But for other communities, she says, “these stories need to be properly explained and placed in a broader historical, social, cultural and religious perspective.” That’s where slow journalism comes in. It takes weeks, months, maybe a year to keep track of what’s going on with a village’s population. Geerdink remarked that it is necessary to follow those who stay behind after earthquakes and also to accompany those who leave; to visit their graves, to watch the young people growing up. How are their lives evolving, how well are they able (and capable) to preserve their religion and culture?
In a new era of hyper communication, saturation of images, messages, news and fake news on social networks, and where time is increasingly ephemeral when it comes to informing, Geerdink takes up a concept that, in the case of Latin America, has a strong tradition: Long-term journalism, the search for an informative fact where the screens and spotlights of the journalistic spectacle do not dazzle, and the complicity of readers with journalists to bet on the time (today we could talk about another time due to the frenetic society in which we live) it takes to sit down to write a report or chronicle, or read it without being overwhelmed by the “last minute” and “urgent” signs.
In the book ‘Cynics are no good for the job’, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski reflected on this with Maria Nadotti, who interviewed him in 1999. The author of ‘One More Day Alive’ noted that “journalism is going through a great electronic revolution”. New technologies greatly facilitate our work, but they do not take their place. All the problems of our profession, our qualities, our craftsmanship, remain unchanged. Any discoveries or technical advances can certainly help us, but they cannot take the place of our work, of our dedication, of our study, of our exploration and research.
Kapuscinski, one of the great chroniclers of the 20th century, appealed in his reflections to report accurately and in depth. Undoubtedly, technological advances have facilitated communications between distant regions of the planet and thus made it possible to disseminate and inform almost instantly, but the roots of journalism must not wither under the impositions of urgency and immediacy.
David Viñas was not a journalist. But reading and listening to him always clarified my ideas. In his essay “Rodolfo Walsh, chess or war,” he wrote some lines that leave me thinking every time I read them.
Viñas writes: “It is also worth asking, in this order of things, if Walsh, with the artisanal features of his production, represents a sort of primitive Christianity within this journalistic lineage, does Verbitsky, perhaps, represent the institutionalisation corresponding to Catholicism?”
Viñas refers, of course, to Rodolfo Walsh and Horacio Verbitsky. He had more than one controversy with the latter.
Viñas claimed that the difference between the work of the two journalists was the “substance”, so to speak. Verbitsky adds facts, data, tons of information, but does not go to the bone. Walsh does. That bone is the capitalist system, which the author of Operation Massacre disarms, exposes and sometimes destroys with information, research, but also with narrative tools that describe in detail, give a voice to those who are silenced by power, and maintain a rhythm directly linked to detective noir, where synthesis equals force in writing.
In All the President’s Men, a book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, you can see how the construction of an investigation works, in which journalists can spend two or three days talking to people, officials, intelligence agents and travelling from one end of the United States to the other, just to confirm a piece of information that they add to the investigation into the massive espionage ordered by the-then president, Richard Nixon.
Then, with that fact checked, they arrive at the newspaper and the editor, the managing editor and even the editor-in-chief of The Washington Post sit around the typewriter. They all give their opinions, edit, write, correct, discuss and define. These people are in charge of an article of no more than ten paragraphs that is part of a much larger investigation. Every word and line, as seen in the book, must have surgical precision. And the work is a well-oiled machine.
Today, this form hardly exists. The major media do without proofreaders. Editors are forced to work with an unbelievable urgency, which is why they don’t read in depth, they don’t “get to work”; editorial staffs are cut back, and the journalist who has an investigation or a story in hand is divided between other jobs to make ends meet, his or her multiple work obligations (hyper precarious) and the total lack of funding (the big media are the most miserly when it comes to cutting back on possibilities and destroying long-form journalism).
The imposed speed to publish a news item or a good story no longer has to do with real urgency, but with the need to generate followers on social networks and impact the public in any way.
Sometimes I think of journalists as ascetics: people who give up everything and walk a path of sacrifice for their beliefs, which, in this case, is our chosen profession. This is not to say that these sacrifices imply a tortuous life or rivers of tears. Quite the contrary: the construction of a chronicle or a report implies a pleasure that, in my case, turns into a smile when I put the finishing touch and I am satisfied with the work. No more and no less than that.
Two quotes to close:
In 1975, Roberto Cuervo interviewed Haroldo Conti, writer and militant of the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT). Conti was disappeared by the Argentine military dictatorship on 5 May 1976.
In the interview, Conti spoke about literature, but his reflections fit for journalism. He said: “Our obligation is to make things more beautiful than those of others, especially than those of our adversaries.”
I return to the interview with Kapuściński by cultural critic Maria Nadotti. The Polish journalist said: “I believe that to be a journalist, first of all, you have to be a good man, or a good woman: good human beings. Bad people cannot be good journalists. If you are a good person you can try to understand others, their intentions, their faith, their interests, their difficulties, their tragedies. And become, immediately, from the very first moment, part of their destiny.”
*Leandro Albani is an Argentinean journalist with a specialisation in the Middle East and Maghreb. He is the author of several books, among them Revolution in Kurdistan (2014) and ISIS: The Army of Terror (2016).
**This article was originally published in Spanish on Espacio Angular.
