RELATED RESOURCES

For more on Samuel Freedman, see his Q&A with Chip Scanlan. To read it, click here.

Growing up amid the oil refineries, chemical plants, and landfills of New Jersey, I never had the experience of sailing. My father did own a small outboard, but our weekend outings on Raritan Bay took us to beaches cluttered with empty Clorox bottles and horseshoe-crab shells. We did not dare eat any of the fluke my sister caught. So, only when I was in my mid-twenties and on a trip to Egypt did I learn first-hand what it means to tack. I spent five days plying the Nile on a felucca, the traditional Egyptian craft, and though the boat traveled steadily north, it did not proceed in a straight line. It canted toward the east bank, then angled back to the west, then shifted direction once again, the single sail pivoting on its mast to grasp the wind.

As a reporter you will be tacking, too, between the shores of truth and justice, trying to hold your direction true north. Our lives would be easier, though much less interesting, if truth and justice were always on the same side, if human events were a pageant of good versus evil. As the Rwanda genocide and the Enron fraud show, there are times when the world does divide in such a polar way, and those times can lift a burden from a journalist's conscience.

What you must resist, though, is the presumption, even the expectation, that issues can be so neatly parsed. If you have gone through college already, then you have probably been imbued with the fashionable theories of our time -- deconstructionism, post-colonialism, Orientalism, white studies, and so forth. In varied ways, these theories tell you that all human existence does, in fact, fall cleanly into camps of oppressor and oppressed. The nation, indeed the world, can be neatly divided between whites and "people of color." All virtue resides with weak; in moral terms, weakness is strength. And any "person of color" is deemed to have the same experiences, values, needs, wishes, as any other, irrespective of differences in nationality, ethnicity, class, and color.

These perspectives are not without worth, especially to a young person assembling an adult self. Any sensate human should want to take the side of the underdog. Guilt is the sign of an active conscience. Undifferentiated compassion is a place to begin. The inherent privileges of white skin, both historical and current, should be recognized rather than merely assumed. An aphorism of our profession, first uttered by Finley Peter Dunne's fictional Mister Dooley, puts it, journalism comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. If journalists tend to be liberal, and in my experience they do, then the predilection has less to do with ideology than a more inchoate desire to engage in what Hebrew calls tikkun olam, healing the world.

None of those values or truisms should overrule the facts on the ground, or, as J. Anthony Lukas called it, "the stubborn particularity of life." Journalism has a weakness for reducing individuals to victims or villains, as if our audiences could not possibly discern gray tones. It sounds admirable for to "speak truth to power," as Professor Martin Kramer of Tel Aviv University has pointed out, unless you think of the phrase's implication that you are supposed to tell lies, presumably comforting ones, to the powerless. If you can stay clear of these traps, if you can resist the false reassurance of simplicity, if you can embrace the ambiguity and revel in the nuances, you might come to realize, as I have, that the most compelling journalism rarely takes the form of chronicling the battle between good and evil. In that contest, it takes no great brain or large heart to decide, as the old labor-union song says, which side you're on. The trickier and more valuable task is to illuminate the collision between good and good, or at least between competing versions and visions of what is a good policy, a good community, a good citizen.

When I think about the dialectic between truth and justice, I think back to a play by Richard Greenberg, "Eastern Standard." Greenberg was writing in the late 1980s, when homelessness was a huge issue, especially in his home city of New York. In the play, four yuppies come across a homeless bag lady and in an act of putative compassion invite her to live at their summer house, provided she serve as their maid. To their shock, she winds up stealing from them and disappearing. "Eastern Standard" earned a fair amount of criticism as a result. Weren't people of good will supposed to feel sympathy for the homeless? And weren't the homeless worthy of that sympathy? To me, though, Greenberg had done exactly what a journalist should be doing, poked into all the gray areas. His yuppies were both altruistic and exploitative; his homeless woman was both amusingly cranky and mentally ill. The same instincts that let her survive on the streets also led her to rob her benefactors. Far from making her less affecting, her flaws made her more so, because they made her more fully human.

Let me give you another example, this one from journalism itself. When he was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Alex Kotlowitz wrote a profile of two brothers and their mother living in the decrepit, crime-ravaged Henry Horner housing project in Chicago. The article created such a stir that Kotlowitz expanded it into a book, "There Are No Children Here." By many measures, it was an accomplished book indeed. The New York Public Library named it one of the one hundred most important books of the 20th century. In an era of "compassion fatigue" by many Americans, Kotlowitz restored inner-city poverty to the political agenda by drastically shifting the angle of vision, focusing closely on children, on innocents.

Where Kotlowitz separated himself from lesser writers on race and poverty was in refusing to settle for easy answers. He saw LaJoe Rivers as both the victim and the agent of the misery in which she and her sons Lafayette and Pharoah existed. In many ways, in fact, LaJoe embodied the stereotype of the underclass "welfare mother"; at thirty-five, she was the mother of eight children, the first born when she was fourteen, and several deeply involved in crime and drugs. Precisely because Kotlowitz portrayed LaJoe and her family so unflinchingly, instead of eliding inconvenient facts, he earned the trust of his readers as a fair broker, a reliable witness. So when he went on to write about how this broken woman spent part of her welfare check on burial insurance for Lafayette and Pharoah, grimly assuming they would die young and violently, he pierced the national conscience.

As someone who has written a great deal about religion, I am struck at how it eludes so many journalists. They try to make it subscribe to their normal framework for understanding the political world -- liberal versus conservative, Republican versus Democrat. The Catholic Church in America is routinely seen as a right-wing force because of its opposition to abortion and gay rights; yet that same church has advocated against nuclear arms, welfare reform, and the death penalty, all as part of what the late Joseph Cardinal Bernadin referred to as a "seamless garment" of theology. When we encounter evangelical Christians in news reports, they appear invariably as partisans of right-wing causes, which many certainly do support. Meanwhile, largely unnoticed, they have become activists on supposedly liberal issues such as prison reform, sexual trafficking, modern-day slavery in the Sudan. But that side of evangelical story does not fit our ready template. If you cannot tack, how will you make sense of a controversy between immigrant Dominican parents who decry the failure of bilingual education to give their children English fluency and teachers from Puerto Rican backgrounds who see the Spanish-language curriculum as a civil right? When I wrote that story, I recognized that justice was on the side of the teachers and truth on the side of the parents. The tug-of-war inside my own brain was the greatest asset I had in telling the story.

You can go as wrong with pessimism as naivete, though, because each is a form of simplistic thought. Newsrooms are sarcastic, wisecracking places, and their gimlet-eyed perspective is part of their charm. Journalists as a species remind me of Israelis in one respect. The greatest insult there is to be called a freier, a sucker. Still, there is a vital difference between being a skeptic and a cynic, and in the coverage of politics in particular I have seen that distinction increasingly lost. In part, we can blame the politicians for the pervasive mistrust. It is the spoor of Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Iraq War; it is the logical reaction to the "line of the day," "staying on-message," and all the other trappings of information management. No journalist I know would want to return to the complicity between media and government that lulled reporters into avoiding reference of Franklin Roosevelt's handicap and John F. Kennedy's proxy invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

But beware when the pendulum swings too far in the other direction. Beware when you find yourself falling into chic misanthropy, ascribing the basest motives to any public official as your starting point. Being adversarial sounds righteous except when it is a mere reflex, just one more way of imposing black-or-white absolutism on a world washed in grays. I know there are rewards, from the social to the material, for ridiculing politicians, especially those with whom you personally disagree. That sort of attack journalism, all punchlines and adjectives, sells a lot of books these days, fills up a lot of hours on radio and TV. It also has real consequences in degrading the quality of our public life -- by reinforcing the nihilistic view that no one's vote much matters and the two major parties are essentially the same, when both those things have been proven demonstrably false in the last two presidential elections; by ratifying the conventional wisdom that governmental programs don't work and the private sector can do anything better; and by driving quality people out of public service and scaring others from entering. You might want to remember something a former labor secretary, Raymond Donovan, said on the day a jury acquitted him of fraud charges, the culmination of seven years of leaks, innuendo, dubious informants, and massive media coverage. "Which office do I go to," Donovan asked, "to get my reputation back?"

Several years ago, Columbia Journalism School awarded Walter Pincus of The Washington Post our annual prize for outstanding coverage of politics and government. The honor came in recognition of a series of articles by Pincus that cast doubt on President Bush's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. So thoroughly did the articles run against the overall tenor of reporting on the subject, and indeed against the view of the Clinton as well as the Bush administration about the Iraqi arsenal, that they did not even make the front page. By the time of the ceremony, May of 2004, Pincus's reporting had been proven prescient.

In receiving the award, Pincus was also invited to address the journalism school's faculty and graduating class. I think most of us expected a speech about perfidy in high places, a rousing call to muckraking. Pincus had spent most of his career, after all, reporting on national-security issues, not exactly a vantage point for observing the American government at its most idealistic. Not surprisingly, Pincus spoke incisively and critically about the public-relations apparatus in Washington and the proliferation of photo-ops and other forms of pseudo-news.

But he spoke, too, about his own periods of government service, two stretches of eighteen months apiece during the 1960s as a staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He spoke about the importance of staying on a beat long enough to become an expert in it, and about the responsibility of journalism not only to expose wrongdoing but pursue remedies. Far from describing those he covered as enemies, mere quarry, he reminded all of us they are "real people, three-dimensional, with spouses and children." Speaking of his own time inside government, he said, "What I saw for the most part were people working hard to solve tricky, complicated problems in ways not visible to the outside world and particularly journalists."

I cannot remember in great detail the audience's response to Pincus. My best recollection is that it was more polite than effusive. The previous year, the columnist Molly Ivins had won the same award and given the speech, she was a great hit with her well-oiled anti-Bush one-liners. If it was entertainment you wanted, she had it all over Walter Pincus. For wisdom to guide a career, I preferred someone who comprehended a complex world. He was the one in the rumpled suit and, I'll bet, scuffed shoes.