Turning negatives into positives
What kind of friend do you want?
Suppose you’re getting ready for a job interview, a big date, or a first meeting with an in-law, a new neighbor, or long-lost acquaintance.
Do you want your friend to be supportive to build your confidence? Or do you want your friend to be willing to tell you about correctable problems like a piece of spinach caught in your teeth or a little grease spot on your shirt collar?
Are true friends people who tell the whole truth even when it hurts? Or are true friends people who soften reality to encourage those they care about?
It’s a crucial question for those of us involved in journalism. It’s easy to avoid unpleasant truths and protect feelings in the short term, but blind supportiveness — well-intentioned though it might be — can amount to passive betrayal in the long run.
Life already provides plenty of criticism. A friend who points out flaws may seem like just another voice tearing us down. And encouragement from friends can be empowering, believing in others’ potential even when they doubt themselves.
However, encouragement without honesty can quietly slide into dishonesty. True growth depends on feedback, and friends are uniquely positioned to offer it. When honesty comes from someone who genuinely wants our best, it can be far more constructive than criticism from outsiders.
Honest friends show respect by risking temporary discomfort and treating their friends as capable of handling reality, rather than as people who must be shielded from it. The key question is whether their honesty targets something correctable and is not just a cruel condemnation.
Telling a friend about a grease spot or a piece of stuck food lets the friend correct the problem. Commenting about a scar or birthmark would simply be cruel. A thoughtful friend considers whether honesty will help or merely satisfy an urge to be “right.”
That’s a challenge journalists face every week. It’s not about choosing between truth and kindness but rather about balancing them. Real friends don’t lie to spare feelings, but they also don’t weaponize honesty. They tell the truth with compassion and encourage without deception.
A journalist’s job can be even more challenging. News stories and editorials aren’t written for the people and things mentioned in them. They are written for a much wider public reading them. While it might seem cruel to point out a mistake that the subject of a news story might have made, noting that error can be a cautionary tale encouraging others to avoid a similar mistake. It also can serve as a wake-up call about how bad things can happen even in situations you wouldn’t expect.
We journalists often are accused of seeking only to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. To some extent, we’re guilty of that. Our overriding goal is to provide everyone in a community with all the information that could conceivably be of use in making the community better.
What’s regrettable is that sometimes such honesty may seem brutal or intrusive or appear incessantly negative when, in fact, the objective is none of those things.
We tend to offer unpleasant truth only when we believe it can be constructive or illustrative of some point that should be pondered. Sometimes our assessment is wrong, but sometimes defensiveness prevents others from seeing such honesty as attempting to be constructive or illuminating broader, uncomfortable issues.
From time to time, we all need to be shocked out of our comfort zones. Right or wrong, that long has been the mission of journalists. We try to be an honest mirror, focused on things that aren’t always easy to see but often need to be addressed. The key to understanding us is to understand that this is not cruelty but rather tough love.
Where we get frustrated is when attempts to provide constructive honesty are instantly shot down as scurrilous negativity without anyone pondering — and, more to the point, acting upon — the information provided.
— ERIC MEYER