What’s the real story?

The media landscape today is awash in imagery. Whether it’s fictional or fact-based, on YouTube, a television drama or a news program, it all has one thing in common. If the story is a natural disaster, a depiction of a dysfunctional family, or a political scandal, all of it is presenting mental images of who a person is. As one takes the images in, they can become a sort of perpetual proving ground for our concept of ourselves, our sense of identity. Every story becomes an opportunity to decide, “Is that how I see myself and others?”

As a reporter, I’ve made a practice of reminding myself that behind many of these stories is a storyteller, with a conscious desire to persuade. When my now 19- and 22-year-old children were young, I often reminded them that the images they were watching in everything from a commercial to an online video were somebody’s creation. And therefore, they should look for and question underlying assumptions. (I suppose it’s a good sign that if I try to do this now, they simply raise an eyebrow, as if to say, “Mom, do you really think we don’t know that already?”)

When shocking or violent news breaks and I have to report on it, I make a conscious effort to step back from the scene and remind myself about the importance of watching what I let into my thoughts. Mary Baker Eddy, the Sentinel’s founder, wrote this in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Stand porter at the door of thought.” She also noted that Jesus made a conscious choice about what to see when he looked on those with problems: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals.”

As a journalist and a Christian Scientist, I have to balance clear-eyed reporting of any situation with a mental choice about whether to accept the terrible news into my own concept of spiritual identity. Recently, I had a good opportunity to grapple with that challenge when I was tapped to help with the coverage of a mass shooting.

A Vietnamese immigrant had walked into a community center in upstate New York and shot and killed 13 people and himself. The editors wanted a story within 90 minutes, which required quick interviews and fast writing. As I approached my sources, I found myself filled with a deep desire to hear fresh perspectives on what had become an all-too-familiar “script”—an alienated loner takes out his frustrations on a random group of innocent strangers and a community reels in shock over senseless losses.

The first job I had was to question whether any person was simply a generic news statistic or whether every individual was unique. I felt that I needed to see the man who had perpetrated the crime from a spiritual angle, separating his true identity as God’s reflection from the violent choices he’d made. This made it easier to dispel the sense of morbid inevitability that often builds up around “types” of news. If it was simply another mass shooting, then the underlying assumption that this type of behavior was now a permanent fact of modern life had just acquired more mental momentum—in some ways, making it more of a challenge to see each event as distinct.

As I was praying about all men and women and their identities, along with this shooter in particular, I felt a burden of gloom over the condition of humanity lift off my thought. I was able to see this situation not just merely as another dreadful shooting, but as a singular situation with specific issues that needed to be explored.

I then interviewed a criminologist about the concerns this shooting presented to society. Initially, he discussed the legal problems faced by immigrants and compared this sequence of events to earlier killings. All this was valuable perspective, but I found I was now looking for something deeper, something about core identities. I wanted to know what this situation might be suggesting about fundamental notions of modern self.

It can be easy to get caught up in the drama of a lurid event. But I wanted to give readers some reason to turn to The Christian Science Monitor during a news cycle that would be chock- full of painful, personal details about the gunman and the families of those he had targeted. I took a moment of prayerful distance, in the way that Mary Baker Eddy said, to “pause,—wait on God” (Science and Health).

I really wanted to expand the choice of mental images the story would offer. The criminologist and I talked about what happened when a man loses a job in our culture. Not only does he lose the income and respect of employment, but he also loses the social contacts, the friends, who might provide a simple reality check. “All it takes sometimes, is one person to break the mesmerism of a bad situation and stop it from spiraling downward,” the criminologist said, adding that a simple word from someone who cares can make the difference between a dark thought progressing to darker deeds and a person regaining mental balance and returning to a more normal sense of self.

Now there was the story.

Gloria Goodale is a staff writer and Los Angeles Features Bureau Chief for The Christian Science Monitor.

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