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The storm beneath the still

With nine good candidates vying for six seats on the city council in the June 13 Minot election, a bubbling scandal at the county and an uplifting slate of great activities on the regional calendar for the weeks and months ahead, there has been a lot going on around the Minot Daily News newsroom the past few weeks.

One constant in news reporting, though, is the journalist’s exposure to the dark, less than pleasant underbelly of items that appear in the news – and the toll it can take.

In this case, I am not going to reference one particular story, because any number of them on any given week could be an example.

News stories are like icebergs. For everything included in a news story for public consumption, there is considerably more than does not it into print. Readers “see” only a fraction of what is there.

It isn’t that we withhold any important information. Instead, we don’t publish anywhere near all of the specifics we might know, nor anything we can’t prove. In this case, think not stories about government malfeasance, but rather crime stories. Even just public records include a ton of information and details that we don’t publish, because they aren’t relevant or, frankly, because they are just so inflammatory or… unpleasant… that we don’t think they are appropriate. Understand: this is more common than it is not.

So, when it comes to most stories, for every fact we publish, my staff knows 10 more. My excellent reporters who cover crimes and court are on the second line (police and police alone are the front line, make no mistake) and inevitably collect more information than we publish.

It isn’t always pleasant. And, over time, it takes a toll.

The veteran journalist is like a veteran cop – or front-line social worker. You see, encounter and learn things that are unsavory and, well, pretty horrible. Sometimes, you live in a world completely tainted by these things. As a crime reporter, you learn all about the lives lived by victims and the lives lived by perpetrators.

You see the storm beneath the still. You see the seemingly loving father, complete with entirely appropriate social media posts and written odes to children. But you also then see the individual, twisted somehow by life’s challenges, who becomes something very different, something dark, something dangerous.

A crime writer learns that beneath the surface of even the most mundane, everyday person can lurk a monster. You learn that monsters don’t generally look like monsters or conduct themselves like monsters most of the time. ‘Monsters,’ in society today, look like everyone else most of the time: they are teachers and dads and babysitters and best friends.

Yes, veterans get used to it. We have to. But getting used to it means acknowledging to oneself that even the most “average” or “ordinary person is also capable of doing some pretty horrible things. You know this because, in covering pretty horrible things, it happens all the time.

That can’t be easy to digest, right? Some people can walk away from work and leave it all behind. Many can’t. Once you are accustomed to the idea that so much lurks beneath the surface of people, it is hard to set that aside. Skepticism then follows. It definitely takes a toll. It’s one of the complications from being well informed.

From now on, when you read a story about a crime that seems pretty heinous, it’s probably safe to assume that what is for public consumption isn’t as disturbing as the sum of all of the details. But also imagine sometimes that when you read about a crime that might seem fairly innocuous, there might also be a darker back story. For journalists, deciding on what is for public consumption is the first part of the challenge in reporting this kind of news. Personally processing this level of awareness is the second part of the challenge, the part few see and the part that takes a very long time.

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