Why is the newspaper industry moribund and, we hope, beyond resuscitation? Veteran journalist William Murchison tells the story “of a profession invaded and subjugated by a type of journalist far less like the average reader than like, well, the members of a political science seminar at an upscale Eastern or West Coast university. That’s irrespective of whether such journalists ever caught sight of a college seminar room.”
“They tended to see journalism as a platform for identifying, investigating, exposing, and addressing social and political grievances: such grievances as often enough the customers didn’t see for themselves, but here was a new breed of newsmen to show them what they had missed.”
“The old-style newspaperman whom I came to know face to face in the ’60s was a differently colored nag. He — he usually was that — had far likelier attended a state school than Yale or Harvard or Berkeley, assuming he went to college at all. He was jocular and irreverent in a newspaperly sort of way. Never slugged down a drink of whiskey he didn’t like. Dressed with minimal attention to fashion.”
[SNIP]
I know exactly of what Murchison speaks. Back when I attended journalism school, my lecturers were tough, middle-aged, ex-army men (no women, mercifully). They smoked, drank, and dressed in rugged jeans. They taught you how to write a mean lead (or “lede”). If it didn’t spell out the Who, Where, What, When, and How of the story—well, you heard about it. If the superlatives flowed and your prose was flowery instead of succinct—you were mocked. You were taught a craft, not an ideology—although it was well understood that the richness of your frame of reference would enhance your writing.
“After Watergate,” continues Murchison, “the paradigmatic reporter was a man — or, now, a woman — with a high-minded mission; namely to instruct society concerning its tastes and habits; to improve things. No problem there — a little improvement never hurt anyone. Problems arose only when the bearer of news arrived at the home of the recipient of news with the look of a doctor preparing a rabies injection.”
The complete, American-Spectator story is “Authors of Their Own Doom.”
Part I of the post: “American Newspapers Dying Of Self-Inflicted Wounds. Good.”