Written by Martha Nichols   

A young Vietnamese woman leads a captured U.S. pilot. She is small, barefoot, forthright; he is much larger—so large he seems alien. The camera stares at her head-on, rather than down from a height.

This iconic image, taken by Phan Thoan of the Vietnam News Agency in 1965, has been incorporated into Vietnamese war memorials, as shown on the cover of anthropologist Christina Schwenkel’s provocative book The American War in Contemporary Vietnam. Yet the woman soldier with the defeated American contrasts sharply with some of the most familiar Vietnam images from western news sources: villagers fleeing napalm attacks, monks on fire. This alternate vision makes clear why subjectivity and first-person accounts matter in journalism.

The “just the facts, ma’am” of western news writing implies there’s only one set of facts and point of view. Rarely is this the case. And if there’s one thing the blogosphere should be teaching journalists—and more important, publishers—it’s that we don’t know everything.

There’s been muted discussion of first-person journalism for years in the online world, although in the past it’s been cast as journalists stepping out of the way and letting sources tell the story, much in the manner of documentary filmmakers.

But I’m not talking about journalists stepping out of the way or citizen journalism. I don’t mean writers should give up the craft of writing gripping narratives. What I do mean is that we—me and you—tell the story. We include our own experiences. We let readers know we have biases; we put ourselves on the line in explaining why we think and feel the way we do.

With the advent of blogging and the rise in memoir writing, this is already happening anyway. But rather than bemoaning the death of so-called objectivity in reporting, I say point of view is the point.

My own biases should be obvious by now. As a feminist in love with the social sciences, I’ve never assumed the mainstream press has an objective take on women.

Feminist scholars and journalists like Caryl Rivers (Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women) have been writing for years about the fabricated state of social reality presented by the press. And as Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel point out in The Elements of Journalism:

"Journalists who select sources to express what is really their own point of view, and then use the neutral voice to make it seem objective, are engaged in deception. This damages the credibility of the whole profession by making it seem unprincipled, dishonest, and biased."

Author and media commentator Ron Rosenbaum puts it more colorfully: “The third person is like the Great and Powerful Oz of journalism—a schlumpy little guy hiding behind a curtain, exaggerating his omniscience.”

Rosenbaum wrote this in a 2002 column about what he thought was wrong with journalism teaching at the time. Citing the “Fallacy of Third-Person ‘Objectivity,’” Rosenbaum says:

“Over and over again in J-school classes, students who had internalized this theology would ask me plaintively, ‘How can you justify using the first person—isn't the third person more “objective”?’ Or, literally, ‘Are you sure it's O.K. to use the first person?’ I almost felt as if I were in Oliver Twist's orphanage: ‘Please, sir, can I have my voice?’"

Subjectivity in journalism doesn't always mean the first-person voice. In The New Journalism, that classic text on what once seemed so new, Tom Wolfe extolled literary techniques that allowed a reader to get inside a subject's head—such as the use of dialogue, quirky and status-revealing character details, and narrative scene-setting.

But Wolfe writes disdainfully about the “I” voice, saying that journalists of old had “often used the first-person point of view—‘I was there’—just as autobiographers, memoirists and novelists had.... This is very limiting for the journalist, however, since he can bring the reader inside the mind of only one character—himself—a point of view that often proves irrelevant to the story and irritating to the reader.”

Ironically, Wolfe is now part of the print Establishment. In a 2007 Wall Street Journal round-up in honor of blogging’s tenth anniversary, he calls blogs “narcissistic shrieks.”

It's true that not every story benefits from a first-person voice. Emotion for emotion’s sake—or punditry’s sake—doesn't forward the cause of journalism, as Rivers recently argued in the Huffington Post.

At it’s worst, first-person journalism spawns deliberate deceptions or bloviating pundits like Thomas Friedman, who pushed for the war in Iraq, for instance, only to admit he was wrong on The Daily Show years later (“after 9/11, I overreacted”). When a comic like Jon Stewart does the grilling, Friedman may look uncomfortable, but he can still laugh it off.

I’m invoking another war here deliberately, partly because I opened with what’s known as “the American War” in Vietnam. Writing about wars always inspires partisan views. To ignore this under a cloak of “objectivity” is to deceive on a grand scale.

But emphasizing point of view rather than disguising it has other crucial benefits as well. War and the supposed big stories of life have long been thought of as the province of “muscular” male writing. Yet consider a reversal on a par with that photo of the Vietnamese woman soldier. The subjective, personal, seemingly inconsequential aspects of the "soft" realm may really matter in getting the truth out about wars or anything else.

I recently attended a seminar at Harvard led by Christina Schwenkel, in which she showed pictures taken by Vietnamese photojournalists during the war. Many weren’t widely available in either Vietnam or the West until the late 1990s. One of a young couple looking after a baby in the remains of a blasted American tank still haunts me.

“Contrary to representations of violence and suffering portrayed in the United States, and in western media more broadly,” she writes in her book, the images of Vietnamese photojournalists, many of whom lived on familial terms with their subjects in infamous holdouts like the Cu Chi tunnels, “also provide insights into more sanguine and leisurely moments in war, and occasionally even fleeting romantic encounters….”

Some of Schwenkel’s most thought-provoking points involve which ideas of professional journalism dominate and shape history. Western journalists are often celebrated as “detached moral witnesses,” in her terms, while the socialist press is derided as unprofessional propagandists.

Schwenkel isn’t defending the Vietnamese Communist Party—far from it. Clearly, the North Vietnamese government used war photos in newspapers for propaganda purposes. Ho Chi Minh called journalists “cultural soldiers” who should wield pencils and cameras as their weapons. But she argues that the North’s photojournalists weren’t amateurs or government stooges, either. She likens them to ethnographers, doing the kind of work that anthropologists do, in close contact with their subjects.

You could say that all war writing is propaganda for one side or the other. Several shots I’ve seen of brave North Vietnamese women in factories, building bombs, have more than a hint of Rosie the Riveter about them.

From another angle, western news photos often portrayed the Vietnamese as suffering victims in need of rescue—imagery that conveys who's in charge or at least who wants to be in charge. Such assumptions in the United States continue to dog how we talk about economic development in a country like Vietnam, as if by embracing the free market and democratic principles our ignorant little brothers will see the light.

Meanwhile, the current government of Vietnam slams forward with its own version of “market socialism,” which makes any visit to Saigon or Hanoi these days seem surreal.

As for Vietnamese Americans, neither side depicts their experience, but continuing to view them as immigrant victims doesn’t jibe with the lives they’ve built in this country or their own press (see the southern-California-based paper Nguoi Viet, for example).

As the decades move on, more photos from both sides of the war in Vietnam emerge. Vietnamese photojournalists rescue old negatives that never appeared in any newspaper, the Vietnamese government allows distribution of formerly classified material, and U.S. soldiers return to reconcile their own experiences. These points of view often clash; they all contain kernels of subjective truth.

As Schwenkel noted wryly at her Harvard talk, it will likely be a long time before we see humanizing pictures of Taliban soldiers cradling babies.

Whether you think such media control of reality is a good thing depends on your own politics and biases. But I believe that being honest about those biases—as well as doing our best to include multiple points of view—can make us far more truthful writers in a complex world.

Article by Martha Nichols
http://marthanicholsonline.blogspot.com