Journalism is a craft that can be learned, or not

Dave Eggers failed to follow some basic rules of reporting

I was telling Bella about a book I’d read recently called “Zeitoun,” about a Syrian immigrant to the U.S. who marries an American, starts a contracting business with her in New Orleans and then, during Hurricane Katrina, gets arrested for no reason while he is busy paddling around the city to help people and is illegally imprisoned for several weeks.

“I want to see what happened to him,” I said, lifting my phone.

I typed in Zeitoun and his face appeared. It was a mugshot but a more recent one — not from his bogus arrest after the hurricane but a more recent arrest for attacking his wife, Kathy.

“Oh my gosh,” I said, reading that Kathy revealed he had hit her and punched her throughout their marriage. Then, after he became famous because of the book, he was charged with chasing her down in the street and beating her with a tire iron.

It was a shock, because the book, by Dave Eggers, makes Zeitoun out to be gentle and calm, a model of strength and forbearance, a devoted father and husband known by friends and customers for his integrity.

Framing Zeitoun’s character in that way makes his arrest during the hurricane on charges that were never made clear and were eventually dropped that much more outrageous. As a reader, I felt the injustice keenly.

But as a lifelong newspaper reporter and editor, I wondered, after learning about Zeitoun’s violent character (according to Kathy, he started beating his children, too, after the book was published) whether Eggers had known or suspected that his protagonist was no saint.

The traditional way to come up as a journalist is to start at a small weekly or daily paper, making the cop calls and covering the village board or the school board or both. You get thrown into these beats without preparation, and you make mistakes. You learn humility and to double-check.

You learn, as you continue in journalism, that memories are faulty, and people will treat the truth as a personal and malleable thing.

Eggers lacks training in the rag and bones shops of journalism. He dropped out of journalism school to take care of his younger brother after their parents died, then wrote a best-selling book about the experience called “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” That started him on life as a celebrity author.

Perhaps the title of his memoir was a tip-off he never had those humbling experiences that can save you from staggering mistakes later.

Eggers’ clear agenda in “Zeitoun” is to expose prejudice against Muslims, a negative force that may have influenced Zeitoun’s unjustified arrest. It’s a good thing to expose, but not at the expense of the whole truth.

Reporters who do the unglamorous work of their profession day after day learn that stories seldom fit into neat narratives. People’s lives are messy and contradictory, and they don’t work as morality tales. The more you do the work the way reporters traditionally have — grinding away at beats that are often boring and writing stories that never have Hollywood endings — the more you accept that messiness and come to expect those contradictions.

“Zeitoun” is an example of what can happen when someone who never learned the craft undertakes a major journalistic project.

Maybe I’m being unfair to Eggers. Maybe I’m bending his story to my purpose — promoting the value of community newspapers and the people who work there.

But “Zeitoun” reads more like propaganda than journalism, and even before I found out about the wife-beating, I wondered about choices Eggers made. A couple of other men were arrested with Zeitoun after the hurricane, for example, and they were imprisoned longer than he was — also for no reason — and one of them had done much more than Zeitoun to help people stranded by the storm. But Eggers barely mentions their plight.

All of this could be forgiven if Eggers were willing to own up to the awkwardness — at least — of having a man he put forward as a model citizen turn out to be a very flawed human being. But Eggers refuses to discuss “Zeitoun” and even ran away from a reporter who brought it up at a public event.

Admitting to mistakes is another thing you learn when you put in your time as a newspaper reporter.

Ken has written about the good work done by reporters and editors who knew their craft at small newspapers (particularly the Post-Star) in his books “The Last American Editor” and “The Last American Newspaper.”

Much of that old-fashioned journalism is not being done any longer, because of the shrinking of the newspaper business, and in its place are stories online and on TV that are more immediate and personal and urgent-seeming and outrage-inducing and, all too often, wrong.