Ottaway Visiting Professor Takes Bold Approach to Difficult Subject Matter
When author and journalist Eyal Press was growing up in Buffalo, New York, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, his father, an obstetrician-gynecologist, was one of a handful of doctors in the city who provided abortions. Anti-abortion protesters gathered at his father’s office and at his house, handing out leaflets to neighbors. More than anything, Press recalled in his April 12 lecture in the Coykendall Science Building Auditorium, “Telling the Story of What Divides Us,” he wanted the protesters to go away, so that he could “fit in” with his classmates like any other high school student.
When another abortion provider in the city was murdered in 1998, Press’s father got word that he was “next on the list.” At that moment, Press said, he knew he had to write about the experiences that he had spent much of his adolescence trying to avoid. The resultant book, Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America (Picador, 2006), is more than a memoir; it plunges directly into the white-hot, polarizing issue of abortion, and includes interviews with members of Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion group that organized some of the protests at Press’s home. The book, wrote Kevin Boyle in the New York Times Book Review, “bring[s] light to a political issue that for far too long has generated nothing but blistering heat.” Press has since made a career driven by confronting often-divisive issues in long-form, narrative journalism that has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and many other outlets.
In a talk laced with earnestness and dry humor, Press, the 2016 James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism, spoke about the courageous people he profiled in Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012). The book profiles dissidents who refused to participate in activities they felt were wrong, from a financial services whistleblower to an Israeli soldier who would not serve in the West Bank. But Press does not lionize his subjects; he investigates the personal costs and moral nuances to these decisions, and puts himself “into the shoes” of the people he writes about. Doing so, he said, produces meaningful and difficult questions and robust, honest journalism. As an example, he pointed to the dialogue surrounding Jerry Sandusky, the long-time assistant to Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno convicted of molesting 10 young boys. Sandusky’s child abuse was long an open secret. But rather than grapple with why people did not turn him in, said Press, why not ask, What if someone had? Would not a whistleblower have been treated as a traitor or worse?
Tackling divisive, discomfiting subjects is not easy, he said in a follow-up conversation at the Honors Center. But he has encouraged his students to do the very same in this semester’s Ottaway Seminar, “Reporting on Divisive Subjects,” the honors journalism course that he is teaching at New Paltz this spring. Casey Silvestri ’18 (Digital Media Production), is writing about end-of-life choices in New York, because, she wrote in an email, “I believe our society is too uncomfortable discussing our own mortality.” In working on the piece, which has brought her face-to-face with people on either side of the debate, Silvestri says that her “own views have been challenged…. I’m actually scheduling an interview with a young man who was diagnosed with the same terminal brain condition as Brittany Maynard, but he outlived his prognosis and is now devoting all his time to preventing the passing of these measures. People like him remind me that I’m not only writing a story, I’m writing about real people with real emotions,” she said.
Nathaniel Sheidlower ’16 (Journalism), is also writing about end-of-life care, focusing specifically on a current bill being deliberated in Congress that would compensate doctors for time spent consulting with patients and family members about such care. The story has brought him to talk with an array of patients, physicians, social workers, family members, and health care policy experts. And it has a personal edge. “I chose this story because of my mother,” Sheidlower wrote in an email. “She passed away from breast cancer in 2007 and I was always curious about her wishes regarding treatment and care. Since I was too young and traumatized to remember, this gave me an excuse to ask my dad.” Today, Sheidlower works at Vassar Brothers’ Medical Center emergency room, where he has seen “people get resuscitated, brought back to life and put on more machines than would fit inside a car. I cannot imagine what it would be like to have your wishes be disregarded because of insufficient paperwork or prior discussion.”
Hannah Phillips ’16 (English), another student in the class, is covering the different perspectives on gun control legislation in the Mohawk Valley, which is home to Remington Arms, one of the region’s oldest gun-manufacturing plants. “I want to be fair to my sources in categorizing them as people,” not as talking heads, she said. Doing so “has been a bit hard,” particularly when her own views differ from her subjects’ points of view. Press says that students are sometimes scared, or shy, about interviewing sources with whom they disagree. He mused about how best to teach students to steer into the skid of such challenging interviews – displaying the very empathy that he channels when interviewing and writing about his subjects.
Teaching the Ottaway Seminar has helped him too, Press said. While he has struggled with how to structure the beginning of his new book, about morally-compromising jobs, teaching functioned as an “anchor” during weeks of working through the opening chapter. Ultimately, readings on writing by such authors as John McPhee, which he read with the class, helped him to get unstuck, he said. The book, which profiles subjects who face often untenable choices between quitting and compromising their values, from a psychiatrist who works in prisons to people in the drone program, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
About the Ottaway Visiting Professorship
The James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professorship, SUNY New Paltz’s only endowed professorship, is named for the founder of Ottaway Newspapers Inc., now the Local Media Group, which operates print and online community media franchises in seven states. The flagship newspaper of the chain is the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y.
Fourteen well-known journalists have preceded Press as Ottaway professors, including four Pulitzer Prize winners: Renée C. Byer, a photographer for The Sacramento Bee; former New York Times investigative reporter and columnist Sydney Schanberg; Bernard Stein, an editorial writer with The Riverdale Press; and John Darnton, a former Times foreign correspondent.
Other previous Ottaway professors were: multimedia journalist and author Alissa Quart; science journalist and author Sonia Shah; NPR Foreign Correspondent Deborah Amos; New York Times investigative reporter Andrew Lehren; award-winning broadcast journalist and media consultant John Larson; Ann Cooper, a former public radio reporter who headed the Committee to Protect Journalists; Byron E. Calame, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor and reporter who has served as The New York Times’ public editor; Roger Kahn, the author of 20 books and one of America’s foremost literary journalists; Trudy Lieberman, one of America’s best consumer reporters; and Martin Gottlieb, the global edition editor of The New York Times.
– Rachel Somerstein is an assistant professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz.