I recently received an advanced review copy of The Days Trilogy, an autobiographical trio of books by H.L. Mencken. Mencken was the greatest journalist of the 20th century, and the Library of America is reissuing many of his classic works.
Rereading Newspaper Days, the book in the trilogy that recounts Mencken's journalism career, I was reminded of just what it once took to become a journalist in America. I wouldn't trade the digital age for the past--journalists are now free to write pretty much anything they want, and that's a good thing. But in the rush to be the first to post, or even to tweet, journalists are foregoing research and interacting with sources. The lack of any boots-on-the-ground training has made reporters lazy and worsened the problem of ideological bias, as the careful avoidance of people with other ideas has made journalists too comfortable with their own.
It happens on both sides of the political spectrum. The brilliant Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at The Federalist, has explored the issue of journalistic ignorance. Hemingway has digitally dismembered Vox, the new liberal website that claims to "explain the news." She has been particularly brutal on Vox senior editor Matthew Yglesias, a truly lazy journalist who seems an endless geyser of errors. And I still remember the moment a few years ago when Chris Matthews was doing his show, Hardball, and going on a tear about the awfulness of the Tea Party. The show was broadcasting live at 5 pm from Washington, on the same day that a Tea Party rally was taking place on the National Mall. In other words, Chris Matthews, a "journalist," was condemning a group of people he had never met and whom were a 15-minute cab ride away from where he was broadcasting. Matthews could have been face-to-face with the people he was reporting on in about the time it would have taken him to use the bathroom.
Yet the conservative side has the same problem. And it's not just the Captain Obvious bloggers whose job it is to react to every PC violation in the culture. A few weeks ago Megyn Kelly, the highly-rated star of her own show on FOX, conducted a three-part interview with Bill Ayers. Ayers, as most people know, is a left-wing nut and terrorist.Yet in this expansive interview, he got the best of Kelly--because Kelly didn't read Ayers's most recent book. That bears emphasis, because it was for me the most astonishing part of the three-segment inquisition of Ayers. Kelly was disputing with Ayers over a factual point, and Ayers--a despicable man--said that Kelly had her facts wrong. He then looked her square in the eye and asked: Did you read me book? Kelly blankly looked back. Why, no. No she hadn't.
I know that what I'm about to say next is going to have people racing for the keyboard to be the first to type "get off my lawn!" or some other snark intended to brush aside this old-school hack who's living in the past. But that kind of dismissive sarcasm only highlights the problem. Because it has to be said, and it is important: Megyn Kelly should be embarrassed and ashamed that she was not prepared for such an important interview. In fact, Megyn Kelly failed. When I was learning journalism in the dark days before the internet, if you scored an interview with someone like Bill Ayers, you read his books. All of them. To not do so would be like being an athlete who did not train for a crucial game.
In Newspaper Days, Mencken recounts his beginning in the business at the Baltimore Herald. Mencken started at the bottom and covered everything: the morgue, city hall, concerts, politicians, policemen, small robberies, new inventions, dance parties. He was sent out to small towns miles from the city in the dead of winter, and once told not to turn around until he had bumped into reporters from Philadelphia.
Mencken became a famous essayist and polemicist, but that was only possible because of his training on the ground. He learned not only to strive for accuracy, but to do research. In one passage from Newspaper Days he recalls stopping in a library before covering a classical music concert because he needed to know more about the composer. This wasn't just quick Googling, but an immersion into the subject with the goal of getting to the essence of what was being covered, and perhaps even coming up with something fresh. One of his most celebrated pieces was the devastating dismantling of Thorsten Veblen, a popular socialist thinker of the 1920s. But go back and read the piece, which remains dazzling. Mencken has a staggering grasp of the leading socialist thinkers of the time and how they related to Veblen. He also knew that if he was going to write about Thorstein Veblen, he had to read Thorstein Veblen - all of Thorstein Veblen. Mencken was not looking forward to it. But "if a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies." He got through it, and that's what makes his essay still readable and enjoyable almost 100 years later. Hunter Thompson is still admired and imitated by young journalists, but few pay attention to how much work and research he put into his work.
I came along well after Mencken's time, but it was still before the internet. I wrote my first stories in the 1980s for the Washington City Paper, a free weekly in D.C. It was "long form" journalism, meaning a story or profile could run as along as 5,000 words. You'd spend much more time researching than you did writing. You'd also get assigned stories that might not be in your wheelhouse; I recall that in one month I wrote about a legendary sports writer, a punk fanzine and a socialist high school teacher. An editor would call you, tell you about a story, and an hour later you'd be in the library--and not much later on the way to meet the subject of the piece. Occasionally you'd burp something up that wasn't quite ready. These were called first drafts, and were rejected and revised. Today they are called blog posts. And a lot of them are written by people, both on the left and right, who call themselves journalists but have never worked a beat or been forced to write about anything alien to them. Jonathan Capehart, a member of the Washington Post editorial board, has never been a reporter. Ezra Klein, the editor of Vox, caught the eye of the journalistic establishment because he started a blog about economics. Captain Obvious, the conservative I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, has never worked at a newspaper. Yet he is a "journalism fellow" at a think tank. And Megyn Kelly can't be bothered to read the books of the people she is interviewing.
This is professional malpractice, no different than if a man with no experience or training came to your house to fix your pipes because, hey, he always wanted to be a plumber and thought he'd give it a try. But it also harms the journalist. People like Matt Yglesias, Megyn Kelly and Captain Obvious are cheating themselves by trying to cut corners. Their laziness more than their bias may be the primary reason why modern journalists are held in such low regard.
