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Journalist Ross Howard: ‘He’d Want Us to Make up Our Own Minds’

Paying tribute to a true pro who urged ‘be curious about the consequences of your work.’

Mark Schneider 21 Sep 2017TheTyee.ca

Mark Schneider was the founding managing editor at the citizen journalism site NowPublic.com, and a digital pioneer and reporter at CTV, BCTV and CBC Radio.

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Ross Howard, who died in June, pioneered ‘peace journalism’ in world’s conflict zones.

[Editor’s note: A stellar journalist, instructor and engaged citizen, Ross Howard died on June 8 of this year. He reported for The Globe and Mail, trained journalists in war torn countries, and taught in Langara College’s journalism program. Among his many generous efforts to open doors for others in his field, Ross helped launch and advise The Tyee’s Investigative and Solutions Reporting Fellowships, a reader funded program that ran from 2006 to 2012, disbursing grants to freelancers. A celebration of Ross’s life will be held this Sunday, Sept. 24, at the Watermark Community Centre in Orangeville, Ontario, to which the public is invited. A fund has been established in Ross’s name to train journalists. At a July memorial held in Vancouver, Ross Howard’s close friend and colleague Mark Schneider gave these remarks about a remarkable man.]

Ross Howard had a natural, joyful inclination to explore. His curiosity led him by the nose through the corridors of power in Ottawa (where we met) and down Canada’s powerful rivers of the north. His curiosity was promiscuous and unbridled: he could spend an hour or more listening to my intellectually hyperactive teenage daughter tell him what she thought of federal politics, and he would listen attentively, gleefully. He did not say; you are full of shit, young lady. He listened with eyes sparkling and asked questions and came away knowing a bit more about the nearly unknowable impulses of a young Canadian girl.

This is the way I saw Ross operate for the 30 years of our friendship. Kind, gentle, curious — and with a prodigious appetite for ambiguity. While most of us are uncomfortable with uncertainty, wanting to come to conclusions quickly, Ross would turn over difficult issues, ponder them from a variety of perspectives, and then and only then — would report out the imponderables to the consumers of Canada’s best news organizations. He’d want us to make up our own minds.

To him, the expression “knowledge is power” as it has been perverted nowadays — that it’s a kind of weapon that individuals use to dominate and succeed — was not his discourse. His discourse – his journalism – was to lead with his curiosity and see if it would lead him to understanding, which was his delight to share.

So the idea that journalism could be used as a cudgel to win, to defeat, to acquire power — nope. This was not Ross.

In fact what became his life’s work was to try and undo what might be called “the weaponization of journalism,” the slow perversion of reporting into a bludgeon to attack one’s enemies. His work was to build a kind of moral rearmament program for correspondents in conflict zones, asking them to meditate on the consequences of their reportage. He asked them to do what came naturally to him for his entire career: be curious about the consequences of your work. Do you understand the unintended consequences of stirring up hatred? Are you truly independent of the generals you interview? He took his questions to groups of journalists all over the world. Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Nepal, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Kenya.

In our last conversation on April 17, we talked about all this. His ability to be comfortable with discomfort, his love of adventure, his curiosity about the nature of conflict and how humans resolve it. He knew his work was dangerous, just as he knew the potential hazards canoeing down rivers in the Yukon, or exploring the Broken Islands off the B.C. coast.

And in our last conversation on April 17, he wanted to talk about his last adventure he faced: dying.

It was “the conversation” — the one in which you know is your last opportunity to say the things you will never have another chance to say to someone who really matters. We both knew that it was that conversation. And Ross wanted to talk about dying. And I said, I want to talk about dying, too. Oh good, he said. But I don’t want you to start crying because I can’t take any more of that. I said I wouldn’t cry, and I didn’t, not then.

He told me that there was one idea that he was hanging onto that he felt would get him through this final adventure; to see and experience death as a natural phenomenon. And that was being eroded by the grief his friends could not conceal.

“Every time I have to deal with their grief it makes me think that there is something fearful about dying, and I don’t want to be afraid. If I get afraid I am going to be depressed and I don’t want that. What’s happening is terrible but it’s natural, and that’s the thought I want to keep.” That’s what he was hanging onto. The truth of unvarnished reality. The sort of thing you see from the cockpit of your kayak as the shoreline slides by, the West Coast mists of a morning fog captured momentarily in the trees.

Ross wanted to stay awake and fully present for his final exploration. Yes, there was a lot of discomfort, ambiguity, uncertainty. But he was superbly equipped for the trial ahead. He had spent his life just so. Thoughtfully considering everything within his grasp, patiently gathering the facts, not rushing to conclusions, his deep curiosity untethered and willing to have the wind and currents take him from here: to there.

Ross dear friend, you have earned your peace. Your life was graceful, meaningful and rich. Your friends and students admired you and you had the fully committed love of your wife Peggy.

I’ll close with a poem by Robert Bly: “After drinking all night with a friend, we go out in the boat at dawn to see who can write the best poem.”

These pines, these fall oaks, these rocks,
This water, dark and touched by wind —
I am like you, you dark boat,
Drifting over waters fed by cool springs.

This morning also drifting in the dawn wind,
I sense my hands and my shoes and this ink —
Drifting as all of the body drifts above the clouds of the flesh and the stone.

A few friendships, a few dawns, a few glimpses of grass,
A few oars welded by the snow and the heat,
So we drift towards shore over cold water,
No longer caring if we drift or go straight.
 [Tyee]

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