Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Writing Blogs -> Writing Tools

Legal Writing

: Writing Tools

When Scandals Strike Celebrities Like Tiger Woods, Try Practicing 'Collateral Journalism'

By Roy Peter Clark

Televised confessions and apologies have become the modern equivalent of the pillories in the public squares of Puritan America. The sinner is exposed. Jeers and insults are hurled. He becomes not just an object of derision, but a cautionary tale for others who might be tempted by the sins of the flesh.

Friday morning will be Tiger's turn to stick his head into the stocks. Woods will, no doubt, apologize to those he has hurt or disappointed. He will promise to become a better person. He will say how much his family means to him. He will pledge to work as hard as he can to regain everyone's trust. I will be surprised if he cries. Then he will answer no questions.
 
This pseudo-event offers an opportunity to reflect on the coverage of Tiger's fall from grace. That coverage has come in many different forms, responsible and irresponsible. As you'll see, it's not necessary to choose between sensationalism and abstinence. There is a third way.

With social networks and blogs sending their alerts, with supermarket tabloids shining a spotlight, and with cable news programs hungry for extended soap opera narratives, the traditional press often feels pressured into a level and style of coverage in disproportion to a story's true significance. Such stories, like Tiger's, are always interesting, but are they important?

Editors at traditional news organizations may feel as if they face an impossible choice:

1. Follow the coverage of the tabloids.
2. Turn their backs on all aspects of a sleazy story, making their news organizations vulnerable to less scrupulous competitors.

I'm going to offer another path. For the sake of conversation and argument, I'll give that path a name: "collateral journalism."

In doing so, I walk in the footsteps of others who sought to reform journalism by adding an adjective to it. The most famous were the coiners of the "New" Journalism of the 1960s, even though it wasn't really new. Even practitioners of "investigative" journalism have tried to set themselves apart as an elite tribe devoted to a set of practices and story forms. Gene Patterson gave us the term "explanatory" journalism, which became a Pulitzer category. Pick your poison: "civic" journalism, "citizen" journalism, "computer-assisted" journalism, "online" journalism, "narrative" journalism, "hyper-local-granular" journalism and so on.

I've long joked with Mr. Patterson, one of my mentors, that although he coined "explanatory" journalism, he could never explain it. So, in an effort to heal myself, I'll try to explain the potential I see in the adjective "collateral." First, let me say that I almost rejected the word because of the near-cliché "collateral damage." But a quick trip to the American Heritage Dictionary revealed a set of definitions, most of them neutral or positive in their denotations and connotations:

1. side by side; parallel
2. accompanying
3. supporting
4. of a secondary nature
5. pertaining to a pledge in support of a loan
6. coming from a common ancestor, but descended from a different line

Here, then, is my definition of "collateral journalism":

Of course this is not new. Any good nut paragraph achieves this effect in a particular story. Beyond the nut graph, an insight into the news can be so revealing that it might be called a "conceptual scoop," requiring more than a single paragraph. Maybe a nut zone.

Or perhaps I'm arguing for some variation of "contextual" journalism of the kind described by the Hutchins Commission in 1947, that a free and responsible press must provide the public "a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day's events in a context which gives them meaning."

I'm about to slide down the ladder of abstraction and bring you back to that moment in time when O.J. Simpson was acquitted of slitting the throat of his wife and her companion. In spite of Simpson's celebrity and the prolonged narrative of a sensational trial, who would argue that the story deserved the level of coverage it received?

At the moment of acquittal, something happened that we still talk about. A meta-meaning was revealed when some white folks and some black folks reacted to the verdict so differently. If you were to write about that higher meaning -- that white people and black people view the criminal justice system differently -- you would be committing collateral journalism. In what is obviously a generalization worth studying, white people see the police as protection; for many African-Americans, the presence of police signifies profiling and containment.

Remember Elian Gonzalez: Collateral stories described the alienation of a hard core of Miami's Cuban-Americans from much of the rest of America.

Remember Natalie Holloway: Amid the never-ending plot twists, a few collateral stories revealed a fear about what happens to our high school sons and daughters when they fly away from home to pleasure islands in the Caribbean.

Remember Britney Spears, the one with no hair and no underpants? I wrote a collateral analysis that questioned the propriety of snarky gossip that ridiculed her at a moment in her life when she may have been suffering from a mental illness.

Back to Tiger Woods. Once we were about three weeks into the story, it became clear that even the most trivial details of the scandal would be advanced by the bottom feeders, such as the paparazzi photo of Elin Woods caught without a wedding ring. More sordid were the inevitable profiles of the dozen or so mistresses who emerged after Tiger's auto accident, including a porn star who recently claimed that Tiger got her pregnant -- twice.

I've spent a lot of time, on the golf course and off, talking about the tainting of the Tiger. Public interest was as high as it could get. Does such prurient fascination require the mainstream press to cover the story in the most sensational ways? To tintinnabulate for the sake of titillation? My answer is no.

A better path is to explore the story for its higher implications, to help us get beyond the obvious and through the secret doors into American culture.

In the weeks since the scandal broke, I wish I had seen more stories that would qualify as "collateral," such as these:

1. Woods as a prototype of Barack Obama, an African-American with light skin and a proper accent (cf. the oafish Harry Reid), deemed more acceptable to white America.
2. A description of the gender differences revealed by the reaction to the scandal: how women focused on disloyalty, while men seemed more concerned with the stupidity and recklessness that resulted in his getting caught.
3. A story on race and gender focused on the reaction of African American women to Tiger's apparent obsession with light-skinned, light-haired women.
4. Whether or not a wealthy celebrity like Tiger Woods can find justice within the legal system. Does his status get him a pass? Or does it attract harsher penalties?
5. The extent to which a double standard governs cases of spousal abuse. What if it were the Tiger swinging a club at his wife?

It is not that hard to generate these collateral angles. Standard idea mapping strategies will do the trick. All you have to do is to get a chart pad and put the basic story idea in the middle: "auto accident reveals marital problems for Woods." Then, with the help of others, begin to draw spokes of meaning out from the hub. Even an hour of such work can reveal as many as a dozen stories and topics collateral to the main news. (I'll walk you through this method of mapping the next time an appropriate story breaks.)

All forms of reporting have certain dangers associated with them. For collateral journalism, that danger is over-interpretation. The evidence must be strong, and it must come from solid reporting.

I can anticipate the critics of my thesis, so I'll give them their advanced say:

• "Why give it a fancy name? That's just good journalism."
• "People don't have time to read your analytic thumb-suckers."
• "You are simply justifying putting sleaze in the paper."
• "This kind of thinking will lead to the death of newspapers."

But consider this: There is no way that a newspaper can break a story with the speed of a good blog or Twitter alerts; and there is no way traditional newspapers can out-sleaze their competitors. So what is left? Unless we prefer a form of cultural celibacy that ignores all temptations of the sensational, wouldn't it be better for us and our readers if we offered them a more thoughtful analysis of the news, those collateral concerns that try to answer the toughest and most important news question of them all: Why does it matter?

Full post as published by Writing Tools on February 18, 2010 (boomark / email).