Flesh It Out: Don't Brand the News.

I feel a bit about this situation:

McALLEN, Tex. — Jose Antonio Vargas, an undocumented Filipino immigrant who is arguably the most high-profile leader of the immigrants’ rights movement ... was handcuffed and taken for processing to the McAllen Border Patrol station, which has been teeming in recent weeks with undocumented immigrants from Central America, part of a wave of migrants who have been streaming over the border.

Hours later, he announced in a statement that he had been released. He did not provide more information.

Mr. Vargas, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, came last week to McAllen, a city just a few miles north of the border with Mexico, for a news conference and vigil organized by United We Dream, an undocumented youth organization, outside a shelter downtown for recently released Central American migrants.
...
Mr. Vargas insisted he never intended to be detained when he came to South Texas, but his supporters were working hard — on Twitter and at a news conference in front of the Border Patrol station where he was held — to use the publicity to advance their demands for fewer deportations of illegal immigrants living in the country and more protections for the children crossing recently.
...
In an interview Sunday, Mr. Vargas said he had flown to many events around the country in recent months where he showed a documentary film he produced, “Documented,” about his life as an undocumented immigrant. He had not been stopped at airport checkpoints because Transportation Security Administration officials checked his passport but not his immigration status.

as I did about the time race writer Ta-Nehisi Coates visited a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side on a group project with the Atlantic, and wrote of getting a ticket from the squad car on the corner for having an out-of-date sticker on the rental vehicle.

It's not "stunt" journalism so much, as it skews the story: doesn't really capture what happens to the everyday people who don't come in with camera crews, capital, or the ability to call for any special help, if needed. It distorts or influences the story, not attempting to blend in and capture the scene, and takes away from the more observant, less participant brand of journalism that was dominant, back before we branded news.

I like it the old way better, because if you were good, the storyteller himself didn't matter. The story sang on its own, not the writer. Like writing police reports, the more detail captured and the less interpretation immediately applied, the more valuable the work holds up over time, as a reference of what was captured.

What Was Really Happening There and Then?

The more visual we've become -- video, still photos, graphics -- the better we can convey this information, but only from a certain angle without multiple viewpoints. Human reporters still need to capture the 3-D chaos -- the sights, sounds, smells, and the feel of a scene*, and the more variety they've got in their own background as comparison, as well as knowing the scene day-in, day-out, over time, to observe the difference, can only improve the quality of the observations.

Which is a roundabout way of saying the more ink spilt on Jose Antonio Vargas' scrape today, and how he got out of it, the less room we will have to devote to what is really going on to the majority of undocumented involved, I think.

An American-raised, well educated, privileged reporter "drops in" on the immigrant experience as a different kind of undocumented immigrant, gets detained, and quickly released, but is his experience typical, and the story that needs to be told?  No.

Likewise, Mr. Coates is summering in France with family this year. (Nttawwt.)
But what's going on on that street corner in Chicago today, and who's telling us the human stories behind those statistics?


























Don't you wonder?







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* Food writing is a whole different kettle of fish. We spend little of our day "tasting", generally.