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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The perfect Journalist

Montanelli was a great journalist, one of the ones who are not boring, that teach because the others read, and they read because they enjoy reading.
But his fault was in believing in what he wrote, in what he believed was right and in believing that only what he believed was right.
And the biggest mistake was believing so much that profit didn’t count and when profit doesn’t count the only thing you can do is packing your stuff and go.
That is exactly what happened to him.

To be able to say what you think needs to be able to think what the people who pay you think, that is the "conditio sine qua non" to write and to be proud to say the truth.
Because the truth is never an objective fact, it is what you believe and what you see.
The important is training yourself to see what you have to.
That belongs to the survival instinct and to the love for your job.
If you love to write more than what you write, then you can believe everything and write about what you believe.
Because there is always another way to see any situations.

I guess that is also what makes a lawyer a good lawyer.
To be successful you need to do what you believe right and you have to believe right what you have to do.

The only fact we still have to establish is what is being a "good journalist" or being a "good lawyer".
For the actual mentality you are good if you make a lot of money, while for the ideologists you are good if you do not conform.
I think that being good means writing well and being able to write also about things you do not believe in.
A good actor is good if he plays well also the parts he doesn’t like.
He has to play the bad guy, and he gives you the perfect performance of the bad guy.
He even makes you hating him, because he actually IS the perfect portrait of the BAD.
So the good lawyer is the one who defends you in spite of...
And the good journalist?
The good journalist is the one who is able to write what he doesn’t believe in, may be giving both the sides of the coin.
In a perfectly impartial way.
What if you read something and in the end you were not able to say if it good or it is bad?
You would have just met the perfect journalist.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As a journalist, I completely agree. Speaking the truth is so important and if you don't believe that what you write is truthful, neither is anybody else. An unbiased journalist reports from both sides of the story. They look for the good in both sides and do what they need to do, which is educate the public.

 
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