Running for Your Life: Rough Road to Reddit

Journalism – the wonder of the news – captured my fascination when Globe and Mail reporter John Fraser began sending his dispatches from China in the late 1970s. It was an exciting time of global promise. China during the Democracy Wall movement. Jimmy Carter was president, the Cold War still on but somehow less vicious than the preceding decade.

Fraser wrote in a fashion that was described to me as like a charismatic man who stops you on the street, grabs you by the lapels, and proceeds to tell you what the hell is going on. If there was bullshit in it, I couldn’t detect it. I was 23 and intoxicated with the idea of working in the same business as John Fraser. Literally, chasing a passion, following my bliss, as myth maven Joseph Campbell advised.

Now in 2018, forty years on, what have we got? Newspapers? Magazines? Is that how 23-year-olds get their news?

Nope. We’ve got Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Here’s an education, the big read in the current New Yorker by Andrew Marantz http://bit.ly/2GoKuZs. Call Marantz a John Fraser throwback, somebody who has not lost the thread of what it means to chase the story. Damn thing is how and where do 23-year-olds in North America get their news? Go ahead, read the story.

There is a direct line from the collapse of the Democracy Wall movement to the rise of autocracy, of hate spheres of influence enabled by “news” sites like Reddit.

Still, I’m a diehard believer in the power (and the glory) of the honestly conveyed story. I mean, what other choice do I have?

Next: Running for Your Life: Notes About Coetze’s “The Schooldays of Jesus”