On 12 February, Tricycle magazine hosted an online discussion about “What is Dharma-Informed Journalism?” for its subscribers. Tricycle editor Alison Spiegel chaired a conversation between veteran reporters Daisy Hernández and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh. Daisy Hernández is an award-winning writer and editor and assistant professor at Northwestern University, while Shane Dixon Kavanaugh is a local politics reporter who covers Portland City Hall for The Oregonian and OregonLive. He previously wrote about crime and criminal justice issues for the paper.
Both journalists are practicing Buddhists. Hernández has been affiliated with Spirit Rock and practices insight meditation, while also participating in her local Zen sangha. Kavanaugh practices mainly Theravada Burmese Buddhism.
An excellent dimension of this forum was how Kavanaugh and Hernández are “secular” reporters (as far as I know, they do not write about religion regularly), but apply Buddhism to their journalism. Kavanaugh and Hernández agreed that in its highest spirit, Buddhist-informed journalism is fundamentally about right work and right speech. “I have found my spiritual and professional life to be very complementary and I am extremely grateful for that,” said Kavanaugh.
In discussing how they bring Dharma to their interactions with people, Kavanaugh and Hernández explored how certain everyday journalistic tasks take on new meaning. Interviewing means sitting longer with people, and listening takes on a different quality in a similar way to how shifts in attention occur during meditation retreats. Hernández calls the experience, “the intensity of listening to what’s around us.”
In her book The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (2021), she interviewed poor families suffering from Chagas disease in the US. She recalled, “using tonglen practice throughout interviews, breathing in what is painful, breathing out compassion.” Her interviews with these families required an empathy and intimacy that reframes the objectivity learned in traditional journalism school.
Meanwhile, Kavanaugh stressed how he often came back to contemplating how to apply the precepts in crime reporting, in particular skilful speech. “Journalism actually offers some training ground for Buddhist practice,” he noted. “So much of journalism is present-moment awareness, ‘capturing a sense of the moment’ as the first draft of history, which journalism is often called. It requires the same kind of awareness in meditation, but applying it to the outside world, including analyzing one’s own reactions to these events.”
Both reporters agreed that religious values-based journalism still has potential for restorative power. The cultural cachet of conventional journalism has weakened. As Politico conceded: “Newspaper culture lost its conviction as it became aware of its own dimunition. Yesterday’s journalists thought the world revolved around what their newspaper wrote.” (Politico) Yet the notion of Dharma-informed, restorative reporting can bring new vigor and power to the journalistic project. The challenge is in following in-breathing and out-breathing, while crafting a story of passion and immediacy.
Hernández noted that many unexpected feelings can come up as reporters try to apply Buddhist principles like equanimity, even as she and Kavanaugh both relate experiences in which their sources feel like they operate as unofficial therapists. Their interviewing can indeed resemble a kind of deep listening that is not categorically therapeutic.
Kavanaugh said that journalists and consumers of news think that reporters and editors swoop into news with a mercenary, predatory mindset. “Making a phone call, knocking on a door, being live at the scene. . . I can say from experience that people will let you know when it’s not the right time. There is anger, hurt, anger at having privacy violated. But people in those moments actually do want to talk to somebody, even if they don’t know,” he noted.
Journalism is listening, but also publishing. How much should one say? Kavanaugh, who wrote for the New York Daily News, sees the value in explosive writing, and punchy, colorful details. But he suggests that less can be more. “Can I approach a subject and elevate it so that it possesses the dignity and respect that it deserves?” Gratuitousness and crassness are not necessary.
Meanwhile, Hernández, as a bilingual consumer and producer of news, noted that journalists should be mindful of their unique role in deciding what news is “worthy” to be published, and how privileging information saturates society (she recalled how as a child she would watch Spanish-language news about Central and South America that was absent in English-language American media). As a reporter in the “crusading” model who is passionate about social justice, she suggested that documenting complexity and even cruelty needs to be done mindfully, so that consumers of news (and their Buddhist teachers) appreciate why such news needs to be circulated.
Given how difficult the world situation is right now, the news itself could be hard to digest. How can Buddhist journalists make the right call in hitting “the right target” for restorative journalism that does not shy away from discussing the facts?
Even though the speakers’ main beat is not religion, they agree that it is important to “try not to lend even the image of proselytizing” when speaking of spiritual journalism. It is no doubt a difficult space, one that I also have spent over 12 years navigating.
This event by Tricycle was a most illuminating and engaging discussion (the speakers were presented with many eager questions), and there is every need for expanded forums on the intersection between spirituality and journalism, and indeed, spiritual reporting.
See more
The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul Down With It (Politico)
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