Can Good Journalism and Personal Emotions Mix Well?

Being a mother means doing whatever you can to protect your child from physical and mental harm. Being a top-level investigative journalist means doing whatever you can to find out and expose the truth. Both often involve going to extremes to achieve intended goals, often at the expense of the very safety and sanity of the undertakers. Yet, the fact that so many are involved in these crafts signal that motivation for continuing in them go beyond personal gains.

If there are to be any personal gains, they often involve what can only be termed emotionally expressible ones that transcend cold logic of cost-benefit analysis. A mother protecting a child do so out of love, not because the child will reward the mother later in some way. A journalist exposes wrongdoing out of concerns that they have a responsibility to ensure social justice, not because they can win some promotions or awards.

When these two instincts intersect, then, the motivations become even stronger. The motivations become mutually reinforcing. Social justice become personal and personal grievances become concrete examples of social justice. New stories being written are no longer about distant characters being out of line somewhere far away, maligning victims that are complete strangers to most. Instead, the stories become deeply personal, even if the characters are not.

That, in my opinion, is the most powerful message of "She Said," a recent film that chronicles how two female journalists at the New York Times as they sought out statements from sexual assault victims of now-disgraced Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. The two protagonists, themselves mothers to young children, mentally raced back and forth from the horrifying stories of rape and legal brick walls faced by their interviewees and the travails of raising daughters.

Balancing the two left the protagonists in a mental wreck that they felt obligated to overcome. They want to use the power of their reporting to ensure that in the future, laws will ensure the likes of Weinstein cannot get away with harming innocent young women. But to do so, they must sacrifice valuable time with their daughters, traveling around the world to collect often illusive pieces of evidence. The juggling act is exhausting.

Often, they confront the same emotions their interviewees feel. Fear of having to battle some of Hollywood's most powerful people, without any guarantee of legal success, professional development, or even personal safety, leave many unwilling to voice their sadness and anger toward past trauma. A sense of learned helplessness, acquired through past failure to change a system stacked against powerless young women in a male-dominated world, is shared by all female characters in the film.

The deeply volatile emotional state of the women accentuate their role in utilizing a powerful media platform such as the New York Times. Yes, they are out for revenge against men that wronged them. But the stories they must not end at personal vengeance. They must go beyond the ills of one man, one company, and one country, to speak to victims across all social classifications and circumstances. It is asking a lot for those who are too invested in their current state of being.

Perhaps it is the dilemma of a global media organization. They are in the business of disseminating factually accurate information for the good of society, but they must also responsibly wield a powerful weapon of global influence. To balance the need for emotional salvation at the personal level and objective demands of realizing social fairness should be a guiding principle of any powerful story. But to actually get there is hard for even the world's top journalists.