Well, most of the time most of us don’t. We don't have the time, the resources, perhaps even the inclination.
As Jo Harper reports in his weekly Letter from Poland, we need to feel we know stuff to be so, that we can grasp and explain it.
Most of us like certainty. We imagine it even when it doesn’t exist.
News is one such certainty. The CNNs, BBCs, Timeses and Gazeta Wyborczas of this world, with their regular slots, their bright colours and famous names, are reassuringly familiar to us.
They help us structure the chaos around us. They spoon feed us packaged fragments of reality. They teach us how to think of what news is…and then they give it to us.
Just forget the facts for a moment and listen to the reassuring music, gaze at the logos, the familiar faces, the weather lady, the sports guy, the steady anchorman. Where would a Tuesday lunchtime be without Nik Gowing and his news team?
News and facts fill that void. Facts slotted, fitted into pre-established assumptions, narrative structures and injected into our lives via mass channels of communication. We believe rather than know.
Each of us gets up in the morning, after a world of dreams, fantasies, half-facts, half-truths. No-one is immune from the games we play in our own memories, in our dreams, in our day dreams. We look in the mirror and we see what we want to see. We roar “I am a tiger” before we pack the kids off to school, tighten our ties, kiss the dog and head off to the office, or factory, or news room.
We may see some boardings on the way, some short newsy things on the metro or the bus. Some may feel inclined to buy a newspaper, or when buying a cup of coffee see the day’s headlines on some board or other. Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz signs, or doesn’t sign, some act or other. Terrorists do bad things. Bears defecate in the woods. We are shocked, maybe a bit scared, but we are ready for the day.
We crave reassurance that the world is as it should be. The news calms us, then consumes us, it directs us, it manages us, delineates us. It is us. We are just news.
Journalists yawn, eat and drink like the rest of us. They have their lives, their homes, they get fed up being underpaid, not being the ones who actually make things happen, do the things, drive the yachts, fly the planes. This constant bombardment with other people’s realities is not his fault, he is as lost as you.
Which brings me to the great Ryszard Kapuściński.
Since its publication in Polish in 2010, three years after Kapuściński‘s death, and in English two years ago of Artur Domosławski’s biography of legendary Polish journalist, the question of knowing remains rather raw for a professional reporter.
“He was a difficult man to know,” Domosławski told me in an interview. “Rysiek combined journalism, literature, facts, fiction and political sympathies, and sometimes he skipped from one to the next without thinking too hard about the consequences.”
Domosławski’s book is hard going for those, like me, brought up on Kapuściński, largely turning a blind eye to discrepancies and likely exaggerations.
“There is a kind of New Journalism, if you like, that sometimes alters facts to create atmosphere, create links and make sense of complexity where often there is no link,” Domosławski says. “There is a confusion at times between facts and the truth and I think Kapuściński believed in telling a truthful story, sometimes at the expense of facts.”
He may not have set out to do so, but in many ways Domosławski brings Kapuściński’s often self-orchestrated reputation crashing to earth. Kapuściński’s time mainly in Africa and Latin American in the biography is tracked down, his conversations, meetings and whereabouts empirically detailed. The Great Reporter emerges as someone with rather thin skin, at times under-confident and unsure if he was a literary figure, a thinker or just a reporter. And in many cases, someone not averse to putting himself in places at times he wasn’t.
In the late 1960s Kapuściński started to shift into literary reportage, but it wasn’t for another decade that his work was translated into English that he gained international recognition: The Soccer War (1978) and his greatest works, The Emperor (1978) and Shah of Shahs (1982).
Kapuściński, Domosławski believes, did make things up. He occasionally manufactured quotes, said he had been to places when he hadn’t, described scenes that never happened.
But Domosławski also argues that Kapuściński belonged to an ‘Eastern European’ tradition with a logic that most Anglo-American journalists could not or choose not to understand. Kapuściński was simply a product of his time and place, Domosławski suggests.
“The Emperor and Shah of Shahs were satirical allegories about the regime of Edward Gierek [head of the PZPR, communist/workers, party 1970-80). It’s all about the futility of economic development without political reform. Haile Selassie, The Emperor, was understood as a way to reflect upon power in Poland at the time where frank political discussion was impossible.”
Domosławski acknowledges that the Anglo-journalism tradition has it that fiction dressed up as fact is always wrong. "The Central European tradition assumes that what readers want is entertainment and enchantment as much as information,” he argues. “Writing in totalitarian environments clearly makes both fact and fiction problematic,” he says. “But then this is not unique to this time and place, look at Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, for example.”
Kapuściński himself called it reportage d’auteur—where the subject matter is filtered through the author’s personality. Some believe it can be traced to a tradition of gawęda szlachecka, a traditional Polish anecdotal narrative running through parts of the literary history of the 17th to the 19th centuries, depending on real historical people, facts, and situations as raw material for literary confabulations.
So did he make some stuff up and if so, does it matter?
Kapuściński’s agency work (he worked for the Polish Press Agency (PAP)) is generally straightforward reporting, Domosławski says. There are some issues he highlights. For example, it seems to be untrue that he was awaiting execution by Belgian mercenaries at the Usumbura airfield. Also, when Kapuściński told him he was in Mexico City for the massacre in 1968 or in Santiago for the Pinochet coup in 1973, the truth was he was in Mexico ‘a month later’ and in Chile a couple of years earlier. When a friend told him that a Tanzanian riot he described had happened in a different place in a different way, Kapuściński shouted at her: “You don’t understand a thing! I’m not writing so the details add up: the point is the essence of the matter!”
It seems clear that Kapuściński was a writer, not a reporter, constructing a legend of his own on two fronts: creating great literature and spinning a legend about his own person.
Domosławski appears on balance to give Kapuściński the benefit of the doubt. “While the Polish ex-oppositionist media supported the Iraq war, Kapuściński was a rare figure of the post-communist intelligentsia publicly to oppose the war on terror. He also sympathised with armed rebellion in the Third World and, more recently, with the new left-wing opposition to Neoliberalism,” Domosławski says. “In some ways he never really bent any rules, and actually stayed very true to his beliefs,” the biographer concludes.
I am inclined to agree.