Wear your biases on your sleeve as badges of pride
Mac McClelland, a human rights reporter for the U.S. liberal political magazine Mother Jones, is a “strict-grammar lover” and a “Burma-book-writer extraordinaire,” according to her tongue-in-cheek Twitter bio. Her international coverage includes reports from exotic locations including Burma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Thailand, and Uganda. McClelland’s coverage of the BP oil spill won her many awards, including the Sidney Award and Excellence in Journalism Awards from the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She is the author of “For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma's Never-Ending War.”
Students of IIJNM’s Magazine Writing class conducted an email interview with McClelland about her writing and her philosophy as a journalist and feminist.
Rashmi Guha Ray: You spend a lot of time with people who are not considered to be part of the mainstream society before writing your articles. Do you keep in touch with them after your article is published, or do you just see them as sources?
Mac McClelland: I do keep in touch with some of my sources, actually. Partly because at Mother Jones we do so much fact-checking that we terrorize sources for months to make sure every last detail is correct, but also partly because I’ve made a real connection with people because of the amount and type of time we’ve spent together.
Rishabh Chakravorty: You write a lot about sexual atrocities against women and post-traumatic stress disorder. How do you maintain objectivity while writing about these matters considering you are a feminist?
If objectivity means that I don’t have any feelings or opinions about the things I observe when I’m reporting, then I don’t think I do maintain that. It’s impossible for me, as a human, to take in atrocities like some sort of robot. But I make my bias as a feminist—or a person who is frustrated with injustice in general or horrified by genocide, or whatever—crystal clear in my prose. I do maintain a healthy amount of skepticism about everything I hear, though, even if the person saying it has been through something awful. For example, I interviewed some men once who were on the run from a warlord. They were clearly and legitimately afraid for their lives, and there wasn’t really any question whether someone was trying to murder them, but was it because they were perfectly innocent bystanders, as they were claiming, or because they’d gotten mixed up in something a little more nefarious? It’s worth checking with secondary sources to back up people’s stories. Once, a refugee told me that when his refugee camp was attacked the guards at the front gate didn’t try to stop the attackers, and I said, “How do you know?” It’s probably better to be delicate about it. I do it to my friends and loved ones, too, actually, and they find my constant second-guessing pretty annoying.
Aishwarya Dravid: Does your presence in the articles you write diminish the importance of your protagonists—the ones the stories are meant to be about?
Well, in my opinion it doesn’t, but you could certainly find critics who say that. To me, because it’s impossible not to react to what’s going on, and because I was in fact there, to try to pretend like I wasn’t there or didn’t have any reactions seems a little disingenuous.
Rajnandini Ghosh: You come across as a very strong feminist character in the world of international journalism. Who is your role model?
Martha Gellhorn! Everyone should read her biography “A Twentieth-Century Life.”
Sushmita Iyer: How do you mentally prepare yourself before you go reporting in a sensitive area?
I don’t know that I do, honestly. I’m not sure what sort of preparations I would make, but maybe I should.
SI: What would you have been if you had not become a journalist?
I became a journalist because I was obsessed with telling a story (about Burma), so if that hadn’t happened, I’d probably be a waitress who writes a lot of stories that no one ever reads.
Nandita K: In your article “A Fistful of Dollars,” you describe visiting tough neighborhoods and dealing with people with criminal backgrounds. Did you take any security measures? How did you feel going about the whole thing?
I didn’t have any security with me, no. And I actually ended up in a pretty scary situation on that assignment. And up until that point, I felt fine about it. That’s the thing about that sort of assignment, or any assignment, really: It’s OK until it’s not. That’s the risk you take, even if you do have security detail.
Shikha Kumar: What is the favorite you wrote, and why?
I can’t pick one! There are different things I love about all the features I’ve written.
SK: The research for your writing takes you to places—for example, Haiti one year after the earthquake there—where you’re witness to some of the most troubling circumstances. How do you detach yourself from them once you’re done writing about them?
I don’t. I carry a lot of that trouble with me a lot of the time. Since I got PTSD, I’ve been going to a lot of trauma counseling to deal with being so impacted, and to talk about tools for being less impacted, or not impacted so negatively.
SK: What has been that one truly life-changing moment that you have encountered in your writing career?
Getting PTSD. I still struggle mightily with it, more than a year later. I was old enough that I should have known this already, but I suppose it forced me to recognize that I’m not invincible, there can be serious consequences to what I’m doing, and that I won’t be able to do it at this level forever.
Priyanka Maheshwari: Have your articles ever had any positive impact in crime-ridden areas?
A lot of people have donated money based on my articles, or at least that’s what total strangers tell me when they email me about it. Some have gotten involved in service; several people have gotten in touch with me to let me know that they’re going to start volunteering with Karen refugee organizations or groups in their area, for example.
Sagarika Ranjan: Your work covering the Gulf Coast oil-spill disaster was highly praised by Newsweek. Meanwhile, The American Prospect calls you “a total bad-ass,” and the Wall Street Journal characterizes you as “a profane young bisexual.” What do you have to say about these descriptions?
I take on some pretty tough assignments, but I think I have too many feelings to be called “a total bad-ass.” I was honored to have been recognized by Newsweek for that Gulf reportage, and by the committees that granted me awards for it. As for being a profane young bisexual, it would be difficult to argue that that’s not true. Although eventually I guess I’ll be an “old profane bisexual.”
Apoorva Sripathi: Your articles are thoroughly researched and reach deep into situations. How long does it take for you to finish one?
Hmm. Let’s take Congo for example. I started the planning to go to Congo—which, as you can imagine, is extremely involved—in February of 2010. I actually went to Congo (and the Netherlands, for the International Criminal Court, and Uganda; we did Uganda at the same time because they’re so close) in April. I got back in mid-May. The story was due June 15 (I was also on assignment in Ohio for a different story for the whole month of June). Then of course there’s working with the fact-checker, which involves additional research, and editing, so add on another several weeks for that.
Shraddha Uchil: You’ve interviewed a lot of people who are not exactly the kind who trust people easily, for example, Ruben in “A Fistful of Dollars.” How do you get your sources/characters to open up to you, confide in you and tell you their stories?
I’m very charming! OK, really, the thing I suggest for getting people to open up to you is to open up to them. I don’t actually do this on purpose or as a strategy, but just because I have always been an oversharer. Coincidentally, I have a job where I need people to share with me, and they are probably more likely to do so because I tell them a lot about myself and answer any personal questions they ask me with total truthful, and way too much, information.
SU: What are the best and worst parts of your job?
The best part of my job is being able to give voice to issues and people and situations that might not have it otherwise. And going to explore new places and meet new people to do that. That is also the worst part of my job; logistically, it’s exhausting.
SU: You have written about female journalists and sexual harassment, especially the sexual assault on Lara Logan in Egypt. Does it worry you, as a female journalist, that you might be exposed to such a situation yourself? How do you deal with that issue?
I have been and do get exposed to sexual harassment or sexually threatening situations. I’ve taken seminars about fighting not just physical attacks but also attacks on personal boundaries so that I’ll have more tools for dealing with it in the future.
Rupsa Chakraborty : What do you think about the criticism leveled against you by Marjorie Valbrun in Slate’s XX Factor?
I think it was misguided and extraordinarily offensive to people who suffer from PTSD, which is a very real problem that claims a lot of very real lives.
RC: You have been described as “feminist human right reporter.” So what is the real definition of feminism to you? What does it mean in the real, practical world?
I think someone described me that way because I care a lot about the rights and empowerment of women. What that means to me is railing against the forces that oppose those rights and empowerment, making as much noise as I can about it so that people recognize the issues and start to address them. It means that when I met a guy in a bar last week who said that discrimination against women was over, my heart broke a little for his total lack of awareness. I just wanted to shake him.
Nitindra Bandyopadhyay: How do you think American media cover issues in the Asia?
I wish I were qualified to answer that. Generally when I need coverage on Asia, I look at Asian papers.
Vikas Gaur: After reading the article by Max Fisher titled The Reporter and the Rape Victim, I want to know, do you think being a reporter it’s good to get involved with the victims or subjects of the story emotionally? Isn’t it against journalistic ethics if we lose our objectivity while reporting?
As I mentioned above, I don’t think anyone is 100 percent objective about anything. I try to make my human biases explicit and clear.
VG: In connection with Lindsay Beyerstein’s article Mac McClelland and the Journalistic Ethics of Tweeting Rape, I want to know is it ethical for a journalist to tweet a trauma victim’s story in this way?
As Beyerstein mentions, it’s a lot easier to intellectualize and philosophize about these sorts of things after the fact, not in the field, from home, with time to ponder it. Obviously at the moment I started tweeting, I was not thinking, “This is unethical but I’m going to do it anyway!” Obviously I didn’t think it was unethical. The most important thing is the source’s safety. I talked with the man who was charged with her care, with taking her to the hospital, etc., before I started writing anything, and I made the decision I did in that moment because he said her story had been covered, with cameras at her home, by the Haitian news, before I arrived. I think it’s important to have conversations about journalistic ethics and source safety, for sure. And my sources’ safety is my primary concern.
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