Don't Worry About What People Might Think. Just Write The Story.
I remember when I did my first major magazine article 35 years ago. It was entitled "Nazis Among Us" and was about a (pathetic) group of American losers who who professed to admire Hitler and the German Nazi Party of WWII. As even then my reporting technique was simply to report and not to condemn, I was afraid that Jewish Americans who read the piece might fail to discern what side I was on. So I included a long introduction which explained that even though I was writing non-judgmentally about Nazis I was really a good guy.
I need not have been so craven. My editor, Michael Parrish, realized what was going on and cut out the introduction entirely. It helped the piece enormously (and helped strengthen the waivering instincts of a young and more than a little unsure writer). I later discovered that Parrish had done precisely the right thing in cutting the introduction. A month or so after the article came out, Bnai Brith, parent organization of the Anti-Defamation League, held a large public meeting in San Francisco to discuss Nazism to which they invited Holocaust survivors, Jewish politicians and the public in general. In the meantime they'd made hundreds of copies of my article which they handed out to every attendee and publically thanked me from the stage for writing the piece. At the same time, if you dialed the White Power telephone number of the American Nazi Party in the month following the publication of my story you got a recording saying, "The National Socialist White Peoples Party as featured this month in San Francisco Magazine."
To me that was the best result a writer could have hoped for. Jews and Nazis liked the piece equally, Jews because I exposed the Nazis in their own words and Nazis because I'd faithfully reported what they'd said without putting any slant on the ball at all.
I need not have been so craven. My editor, Michael Parrish, realized what was going on and cut out the introduction entirely. It helped the piece enormously (and helped strengthen the waivering instincts of a young and more than a little unsure writer). I later discovered that Parrish had done precisely the right thing in cutting the introduction. A month or so after the article came out, Bnai Brith, parent organization of the Anti-Defamation League, held a large public meeting in San Francisco to discuss Nazism to which they invited Holocaust survivors, Jewish politicians and the public in general. In the meantime they'd made hundreds of copies of my article which they handed out to every attendee and publically thanked me from the stage for writing the piece. At the same time, if you dialed the White Power telephone number of the American Nazi Party in the month following the publication of my story you got a recording saying, "The National Socialist White Peoples Party as featured this month in San Francisco Magazine."
To me that was the best result a writer could have hoped for. Jews and Nazis liked the piece equally, Jews because I exposed the Nazis in their own words and Nazis because I'd faithfully reported what they'd said without putting any slant on the ball at all.
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