THE ROOTS OF JOURNALISM
I'm winding up my visit to Washington, D.C., ...
...where Barnes & Noble are the exclusive RISK AND REDEMPTION booksellers. Jane Graf of B&N Georgetown took me on a tour of the store at 3040 M Street. The place is as historic as it is huge: this was the first Ford dealership in the nation's capital. Model-T's once rolled out the broad front windows where stacks of books -- including mine -- now attract browsers from the street. The biggest kick of the week for this reporter was seeing my book sitting in close proximity to the collected letters of Hunter S. Thompson, one of the most original and unpredictable keyboard-pilots in all of American journalism, and a hero of mine since university days.
I was glad to see they had The Doctor's picture featured, too, just across the river in Arlington, Virginia in the marvelous new $50 million NEWSEUM, the Freedom Forum's repository of the history of journalism. I was honored to speak there this past Friday to a lunch-time gathering of Newseum visitors. My voice was hoarse after a speech the night before to the Canadian American Business Council, which was taped by C-SPAN for later broadcast. But I croaked my way through an hour's question-and-answer session, and as I've come to expect in the United States, people seemed more than a bit jaded and suspicious about the stuff they're being presented with in the guise of news.Can you blame them ? Strolling through the Newseum's corridors is a journey back to the roots of American journalism. It's always been a big, brawling industry where fortunes are made and lost, but even the most brazen robber-baron of a yellow-journal proprietor would be amazed at the profit-preoccupation of many of today's TV networks. Edward R. Murrow cautioned Americans that television news was headed in a dangerous direction; but would even he have expected such a complete subordination of news values to entertainment expediencies as we see at, say, GE-owned NBC today ? I doubt it.
Read (or listen to) their work, and you'll see that greats like H.L. Menckhen, I.F. Stone, Murrow, Cronkite, Brinkley and Wallace all expected threats from business interests to the pursuit of pure reporting, but to see journalism subjected so completely to the quest for big ratings and revenue probably seemed to most of them a nightmare that American journalists would somehow manage to prevent. I have to believe that even Dr. Hunter S. Thompson was only half-serious when he called TV "a corrupt money trench." But then, that's my way of looking at things. And I'm someone who still has hope for network news in the United States, and a guy who's glad to agree to the Newseum curators' request to place my leather jacket -- the Dhahran bomber -- on display for a time in their collection. I'll just make sure to stuff my dog-eared first-edition copy of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS in the pocket...