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The best thing about checking out e-books and audiobooks from the Central Arkansas Library System is the deadline to get them read before they vanish from my Kindle tablet. Yes, physical books have due dates, but for a few cents you can give yourself an extra week or two. Or three. The electronic versions will disappear mid-sentence and never add to the stack of books catching dust on my dresser.
Lately I’ve been plowing through some thought-provoking nonfiction. In this space I’ve already recommended “She Said,” the account by two New York Times reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, of breaking the story of Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual abuse in October 2017. I followed that with Ronan Farrow’s “Catch & Kill,” which recounts his simultaneous work to uncover Weinstein’s abuses. Kantor and Twohey ended up scooping Farrow by five days because his employer, NBC, slow-walked his project and finally declined to air it.
The techniques used to commit journalism are always going to be fascinating to me, but the contrast between the New York Times and NBC was disturbing.
The Times had found a novel way to move beyond the “he said-she said” problem of reporting on sexual harassment: Instead of reporting the allegations and denials, reporters Emily Steel and Michael S. Schmidt documented millions of dollars in financial settlements that Fox News and host Bill O’Reilly had paid to female accusers over the years. That story, in April 2017, led to the prompt cancellation of O’Reilly’s top-rated show and served as a model for Kantor and Twohey’s months-long pursuit of Weinstein, whose aggressive lawyers had confounded the efforts of numerous reporters over the years, allowing him to victimize more and more women.
Meanwhile, NBC News ran hot and cold on the Weinstein story, allowing Farrow and a production team to spend months and resources on reporting and video production only to conclude that the reporting didn’t meet its journalistic standards. Farrow was able to take the same facts and evidence to The New Yorker for print publication, and to share a Pulitzer Prize with Kantor and Twohey.
The month after the Weinstein revelations supercharged the #MeToo movement, Farrow learned why NBC might have been hesitant to be part of the story: Matt Lauer, NBC’s $25 million-a-year Today Show host, was suddenly fired for his sexual behavior toward a coworker. More victims emerged there too.
A double-dose of Weinstein might be a bit much for anyone else. If you read only one of the books, make it “Catch & Kill.” But if you are looking for something completely different and mind-expanding, check out “Talking to Strangers” by Malcolm Gladwell.
Gladwell is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m a fan of his books and his podcast, “Revisionist History.” The audiobook of “Talking to Strangers” is essentially an extended podcast, with recorded interviews and even a theme song.
As Gladwell explains from the get-go, he was inspired to research and write “Talking to Strangers” by the 2015 death of Sandra Bland. Bland, a young African American woman, killed herself in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas, three days after she was arrested when an improper traffic stop escalated. But this book is not primarily about policing or civil rights. It’s about human failure to communicate and the problems that result, both common and extreme.
In his trademark style, Gladwell uses seemingly unrelated anecdotes to explain the big picture. A computer program working from arrest records is significantly better at predicting which suspects can safely be released on bond than judges who also eyeball the accused face to face. Spy agencies can be maddeningly slow to recognize double agents in their midst, like Ana Montes at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Why were pedophile coach Jerry Sandusky and Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff not stopped sooner?
The explanation in every case, as Gladwell explains it, is our human tendency to “default to truth” — we give people the benefit of the doubt. We assume we are being told the truth unless the evidence of a lie is sufficient to overcome that default. And sometimes (as I’ve noted in the impeachment hearings) we don’t want to accept that an admired person is lying, no matter how overwhelming the evidence.
While it seems like being on the lookout for lies would be a useful default setting, Gladwell disagrees. To be constantly suspicious and on guard, he argues, would be a miserable way to live when most people really are telling the truth most of the time.
People who are that suspicious should become auditors or FBI agents. Or journalists.
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Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz. |