He gets emotional recalling the video of the massacre of October 7 that was screened at the Israel consulate in Toronto. The article is also very good. I bet if we see the video, we'll understand why Israel is not stopping.
KINSELLA: It was up to journalists to expose Hamas' delight in savagery
Don’t make it about you.
That’s one of the first things we learned in journalism school. First-person writing wasn’t completely outlawed — but, if your story had “I” and “me” in it, you had to have a very good reason.
And: what you feel, as a writer, was irrelevant. What matters is how the people you’re writing about feel. Their feelings matter a lot more than yours.
Journalists and writers started to violate these rules in the early 70s. Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Ta-Nahisi Coates, James Baldwin and others started to place themselves in their stories — and they started to sell lots of books and magazines and newspapers.
Some, like George Plimpton, even got into the boxing ring so he could write more vividly about boxing. The new approaches had different names: Participative Journalism, New Journalism. Traditionalists didn’t like it, but the first-person approach attracted converts.
Sitting in a darkened room at the Israeli Consulate in Toronto this week, watching unspeakable horrors unfold on a screen, I — sorry — remembered these journalism rules. They created a dilemma.
torontosun.com
KINSELLA: It was up to journalists to expose Hamas' delight in savagery
Don’t make it about you.
That’s one of the first things we learned in journalism school. First-person writing wasn’t completely outlawed — but, if your story had “I” and “me” in it, you had to have a very good reason.
And: what you feel, as a writer, was irrelevant. What matters is how the people you’re writing about feel. Their feelings matter a lot more than yours.
Journalists and writers started to violate these rules in the early 70s. Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Ta-Nahisi Coates, James Baldwin and others started to place themselves in their stories — and they started to sell lots of books and magazines and newspapers.
Some, like George Plimpton, even got into the boxing ring so he could write more vividly about boxing. The new approaches had different names: Participative Journalism, New Journalism. Traditionalists didn’t like it, but the first-person approach attracted converts.
Sitting in a darkened room at the Israeli Consulate in Toronto this week, watching unspeakable horrors unfold on a screen, I — sorry — remembered these journalism rules. They created a dilemma.
KINSELLA: It was up to journalists to expose Hamas' delight in savagery
Most of us present broke one of the most important rules of journalism. We wrote in the first person, and we wrote what we were feeling.
torontosun.com
