A continual tilting toward windmills!
The sun rose this morning on a new surf landscape. One where a proud little worker bee from Sao Paulo, Brazil with the letters H and D emblazoned on the nose of his surfboard (what’s HD?) stands above the blonde/bald Adonises. One where we can speak truthfully about things maybe?
I hate to keep beating this drum but just one more time, for clarity’s sake!
Yesterday early, I published details of Mick Fanning’s brother’s death. Through the day Derek and I debated its pertinence before Derek evaporated it in the afternoon and published the wonderful piece What is Newsworthy? documenting why/how we do what we do.
And in the comments a very great discussion took place, one that inspired. The whole reason I published in the first place, even though, it turned my stomach was because I am tired, exhausted even, of the surf media being a dumb ostrich. Anytime something veers into the distasteful or uncomfortable we put our collective head in the sand. It has become patently absurd especially when things are either widely reported externally and/or very very public on social media or elsewhere.
Longtom said it well. “It was bizarre (that day) hearing people giving shout outs to Mick and wondering what the fuck was going on and then watching the whole thing blow up into a huge mainstream story……like every News Bulletin I heard today featured it as the lead story, front page of New Ltd newspapers. Can’t silence something that is news to that extent, no matter how much you want to respect the family. At that point it seems ridiculous, surreal even to try.”
Derek added, succinctly, that part of BeachGrit‘s trouble when it comes to reporting uncomfortable truths is, “the architecture of our site doesn’t help. Our headlines… YELL… and give the impression we’re tap-dancing every time we post…”
Completely true. Still, one of the things I most wanted to do when we founded this little nugget was to be honest about what’s happening. Anti-depressiveness first but truthfulness also even when tawdry second!
Burt Reynolds (welcome Bo “Bandit” Darville!) added, “When you want the idea of exposing the truth to become why people read as opposed to what you feel your individual narrative can give to a story then you’ve stepped a foot wrong in my opinion.”
And he is exactly right. I don’t want to be an ugly tabloid and would never, ever report something personal and private. I have sat on more of those stories than I can count. But, again, if something is widely reported and/or impossible to ignore public then, hell, even if it turns the stomach it flies, in my opinion, because opening up the window and letting air into the stale, ultra-conservative, fearful den that is the current state of the surf has value.
Captain Clark added, ” I personally don’t think dodging the elephant in the room does anyone any good albeit done in the right way. Dodging enables the issue to fester causing regrets.” And boredom. And an utterly skewed perspective. And slow slow death.
So I will keep tilting at this damned windmill unless a super minority says, “Stop it!” And I will point back to this post, the next time, because it is not personal and it is not mean-spirited. The truth is simply nothing to fear.
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Oh of course that…..I guess I meant breaking any story at any cost. What we do is generally fun and light, not heavy and dark. Anti-depressive!
Chas – I’m not trying to be shitty (I promise), and I apologize if it’s been beaten to death (bad, bad, bad metaphor), but why aren’t the circumstances around Andy’s death an example “of the surf media being a dumb ostrich”? Even though I read your book and listened to you talk about it on Surf Splendor, I just can’t grasp the finer points of your opinion. Blame the American school system, I suppose. Thanks for putting up with this.
That is exactly what has shitted me all these years. I can’t get it right myself. I wish I could have written “Andy died of a drug overdose” minute one and then not made him an object lesson after that… But it is what I’m saying we should do with Mick’s brother, I suppose. My finer points are very dulled but, at the end, I just want to say what’s true and then move quickly on to the next shiny thing. I ain’t a journalist and used to seethe inside when people called me one. I just want to be able to riff openly. To dance, baby.
Thanks. I respect that. Let’s dance!
To me Rory’s thought about it is the most relevant. Ethics in journalism, jesus I can’t even write that without throwing up a little bit. The thing that counts for a reporter is simple: are you interested in it? If you are, then you pursue it, you call people up, go visit them, scratch away until it makes some kind of sense (or not). If you are not interested, well to you it won’t be a story. Peter Fanning may well be a story, but you’d have to be interested enough to follow it up, talk to the cops, his friends, eventually his immediate family, try to answer a deadly and terrible question: why is one brother a three time world champion and internationally acclaimed role model, and the other dead in his sleep? Just re-publishing an unexamined bit of reportage isn’t that, or even close to it, and yeah, the Grit’s tendency to popgun headlines made it look less like ethics and more like clickbait.
But you guys don’t have to be all things to all people for fuck’s sake! Don’t get all serious now. It’s too late!
Glad to see the issue even debated here, but both posts – and greater discussions on the obligation surf journalism – ignore one very obvious point: There is essentially no such thing as surf journalism, there is only surf editorializing.
Spend some time combing through every recent article in every periodical we entrust to report on our sport. You will find that somewhere in the area of 100% of these
articles are a hybrid of news + opinion aka, an “op ed.” Instances in which we simply gather and report facts are almost nil. Why? Because no matter how hard we try, we cannot escape the addiction to surfing and its cultural vacuum. The men and women (j/k of course there are no women) tasked or self-assigned to cover these beats are – in some sense – professional surfers.
We seem obsessed with shepherding surfing into the mainstream, so let’s use the LA Times as an example, specifically their reporting on my beloved Dodgers. That
coverage is divided into two, very clearly defined categories: straight news and opinion. STRAIGHT NEWS would cover trades, injuries, management shakeups, (and probable drug overdoses), gathering quotes from all parties to tell us – sometimes with measured speculation but never with a firm stance – what happened. That news is then absorbed and filtered through separate columns in the OPINION section, where we as readers go EXPECTING bias. This distinction is non-existent in surf journalism. Because there are no actual surf journalists with any measurable distance from the subject matter. We simply do not have someone we call and say, “This happened. Report on it as though it were an ballot bill or a school shooting.” I suspect we think surfing is SO SPECIAL, that dry coverage is somehow beneath us.
(Yes, even the best news pieces in the finest publications sport some whiff of a stance – probably inevitable – but ours is never just a whiff. It’s always a heaping spoonful. A bland and predictable spoonful, but a spoonful nonetheless.)
Journalists – good ones – strive to exist at a remove from their subject matter and are held in check not by peers (fellow surfers) but by bosses (and a readership) who demand distance between actual, researched facts and opinions. This industry does not have any such checks or balances. It has only more…surfers.
We want quality, unbiased coverage. Yet we write and report unchecked. We want fresh points of view. Yet we’re so positive this thing we do can only be understood by those who do it that we would never trust an outsider to discuss it. Any outsider with a microphone (and an education and a brain) and a few degrees of distance from Mick Fanning would have found a way to discuss the death of his brother with taste, sensitivity and an understanding of the audience. But such a person would never be welcomed into our myopic tribe of fish taco junkies.
Your crime, if any, was an inability to simply report the facts and to trust your readers to absorb them as such. And in surfing, “just the facts” is the grittiest thing you could every do.
Hey Wyatt, totally agree with that……..has this been covered by mainstream press in USA?- because it’s been beaten to death here in Oz- so all this… “Any outsider with a microphone (and an education and a brain) and a few degrees of distance from Mick Fanning would have found a way to discuss the death of his brother with taste, sensitivity and an understanding of the audience” was done. Here’s an example: http://www.smh.com.au/sport…
Comment-aided introspection, oh the wonders of the internet! An honest, assessment Chas, with the exception of this:
“stands above the blonde/bald Adonises.”
Only if he’s on a step ladder.
Is Rory up next to talk about this subject..??
Yes!
Only now, and only because you asked.
Chas initially asked if I wanted to write something about it. My reply:
“…everyone else is going to write some heart wrenching whatever about it, I’m over that. But if I hear anything interesting I’ll do something on it.”
It wasn’t too hard to read between the lines from the outset, but I just didn’t think it was very interesting. Except in the “surfer loses a brother on the eve of world title showdown but still manages to perform” angle. So I was happy to check that off, then just ignore it.
It’d be another matter if the guy was somehow relevant outside his own life, but from what I can tell he was just a normal dude with a brother who’s a pro surfer. So, to me, there’s no real story there.
As far as lines are concerned, what is, or is not, acceptable to post… I don’t know if there really are any. First and foremost I see it as my job to write entertaining stuff. I don’t consider myself a journalist, bound by ethics, with some sort of duty to tell the truth.
I’m also happy to defer to Derek’s judgment in these matters. He’s dialed me back two, maybe three times, over the last year or so. Each time he was right. Whatever I’d just written was usually just mean, without anything insightful or funny to add, and was best left unsaid.
Can the BG trio’s next website be a forum exclusively for mean, insightless things that are best left unsaid?
Double yes!
I agree with you 100% Rory. This was not really interesting news like you said. But I also don’t get why this new generation has to be so politically correct and try to not offend anyone. Dancing around the real issues. I say talk, debate, get offended, learn why you are so offended, try seeing the other side, hash it out, and get over it. Thats why I love this article so much bc there is an actual debate about real issues here on the comment section. Mahalo and Aloha. Hope to see you in the line up sometime Rory.
Completely agree with Rory, I do believe this is a surf website, hence comprising of content with an inherent focus on all things surfing and surf-related, and I don’t see how, besides the obvious inspirational storyline of Micks dedication and mental fortitude to compete under the circumstances, reporting in any detail as to the details of his brothers death has anything to do with surfing. “Ultra-Hard Surf Candy”? In this regards, I think not. I believe Mick, in his social media postings, had asked for some privacy in the matter, no doubt being preemptively concerned with stories which were going to be posted by surfing and surfing-related websites such as this one, concerning his brothers passing. Let others post what they will, but to remain silent on an issue such as this is, I believe, much more beneficial to this website as part of the surf community than just jumping on the sensationalist bandwagon. Class is permanent, form is temporary.