lecture with John Ross

This week John Ross was our guest in class. Who is this man? A dissident, rebel journalist whose approach lies well outside of the norms associated with the profession, John Ross is a unique voice who calls his own shots. What is his approach? Ross sums it up with these three questions:

1) Who is getting screwed?
2) Who is doing the screwing?
3) What can be done to change the situation?

Ross lives by his own ethos that guides what he does and how he does it. He believes in going to the place where it happens, though they may not want you, because that's where what really matters is happening. He believes that the best stories are those that happen away from power because those places in fact have everything to do with power. He believes in reporting from the bottom-up, not the top-down. He believes that as a rebel journalist, one should be a direct participant in the story being told and that one should both advocate and incite rebellion in what you do. As such, a rebel journalist has a responsibility to serve the community at the expense of the notion of a "career".

His stories are like murals; they try to breathe life into the fabric of the story itself; imagery has its role. There is more of a context to be shared than just who said what when (and maybe why if you're lucky). For Ross, history is like a boomerang, destined to come back to hit you over the head if you forget about it, as we too often do in our culture of short-term memory...

He says that he no longer does interviews, preferring instead to talk with those that are there, where the story is. He has several reasons for this; he prefers not to rely much on technology, not wanting to cede power to it. Using a recording device introduces a power structure into the relationship, one of interviewer (who wields the power) and interviewee (who is subject to it). A recording device also introduces an element of artificiality as well, such that the interviewee may become self-conscious of his/her words, may start to think too much about what s/he is or is not saying, trying to mold him/herself to an image that lies outside of who they really are. Instead, by talking with the people, they having no idea that he is a reporter, a different kind of story emerges. And when he writes it down, he is very cognizant of the uniqueness, the idiosyncrasies, the inflection, phrases used, body language, etc., of those he speaks to, all to produce a story that is closer to the truth, to his truth, than a j-schooler would be able to.

As such, Ross answers to no one; he doesn't have to and that defines who he is. And that is why one must respect him, for having the courage to not only have created his own ethos, his own epistemology, as it were, but to be able to use that ethos to further social change, fighting against the status quo to the end...