Snow Emergency

Due to some strange, unforeseen circumstances, I found myself driving several different cars in the last twenty-four hours. Yesterday, I finally got around to some domestic responsibilities that included tightening a hand rail that had loosened under the constant attack of children. These same children were being scalded by a leaky hot-water tap in the bathtub. I keep a small box of washers and springs and valve seats on a shelf in the basement. Each time there is some sort of plumbing job, I retrieve this, and within about twenty minutes of fiddling, I discover that I do not have any of the parts I need, so it’s off to the hardware store.

I drove the wife’s car, and I happened to catch “On the Media,” NPR’s meta-media radio program that is often quite good, but not good enough to compel me to turn on the radio of a Sunday afternoon. Yesterday made me reconsider my weekend blackout on media. Though they had not yet heard of Hunter Thompson’s passing, Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield had a brilliant triangulation between Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein’s key anonymous source in their Watergate reporting, and “Inside Deep Throat,” the new behind-the-scenes movie about the first hardcore porno flick. I had not realized that the movie opened and the Watergate break-in happened in the same week, in 1972. To my slightly touched mind, these coincidences tend not to be coincidences at all, but representative moments. Now, thirty-three years later, we find ourselves at a similar moment. Who could have guessed, three decades ago, that we would find ourselves fighting the same battles as if they’d never happened—arguing, as those nitwits over at Powerline are wont to do, about whether Watergate was “no big deal, afterall” and giving the FCC wide-ranging power to put media companies out of business for perceived obscenity violations.

We’ve been urging anyone who will listen to go back and either read “All the President’s Men” or see the film. It is an edifying thing to do for a number of reasons. First, as a palliative against the widespread suspicion that newspapers and reporters are “on the make” at all times, either literally or figuratively. As Gladstone and Garfield pointed out, the last thirty years have been hell for politics, government, and the social fabric in general—but they have been very good to the press, because it has been the press that has revealed the unpleasant truth about so much ugliness from Vietnam to Iraq. That process has now reversed; politicians and corporate marauders grow more comfortable and more arrogant as they “discredit” the press, or at least convince the general public that there can be no news without a liberal slant (unless it is owned by Rupert Murdoch). Nicholas Lehmann, in last week’s New Yorker, seems to have picked up on this irony—that neo-cons are, interestlingly enough, hardcore relativists when it comes to the news. It’s all a snow-job, unless its in the Bible.

Today, we have snow emergencies around town. The deputy editor, who is on vacation in New York this week, put her car in my charge for just such an eventuality. It was safely parked in my driveway, but I got a call early this morning from my old friend DK, who happens to be in New York this week, too. He had two cars parked in the tow zone—so off I went, on an errand that would involve three different cars across two counties. And plenty of radio. So I learned that Hunter Thompson had died, and he too reminded me of how times have changed—but also stayed the same.

While today there is plenty of raw material for a fearless writer like Thompson, I worry that our culture and our institutions have been stung too many times by great, insightful, truthful journalism, and that the reading public has grown innured to it. Great journalism is, in one of its modes anyway, supposed to “speak truth to power,” but power is presently winning the contest. It is doing this by cultivating a very sophisticated and cynical understanding of media, and manipulating it. By contrast, Hunter Thompson was a hero to all earnest and poetic truth-seekers who could tolerate his selfishness long enough to see the inner workings of whatever subject he trained his sights on, no matter how irreverent or unorthodox he wished to be in telling the story. I have no idea why he might have decided to commit suicide, but I do know that it comports with both his personality and the times he was now forced to live in. (It is telling, I think, that my favorite Thompson composition was this memorable obituary of Richard M. Nixon; it is a highly useful adjustment of focus for those of us whose view of those dark times has grown fuzzy or sepia-toned.)

Anyway, there will be plenty of obituaries that are far more telling and eloquent than anything I could say about Thompson, but I did want to take this thing a little further in a different direction. “On the Media” had a long segment on the Watergate Deep Throat and efforts over the years to identify who that source may have been. A journalism professor named Bill Gaines conducted a class that asked its students to pore over all available information—primarily the books and articles of Woodward and Bernstein— from Watergate to determine, as scientifically as possible, who Deep Throat was. Gaines and his class believe that they have, beyond a doubt, identified who that anonymous source was. Bob Garfield pressed Gaines on the ethics of this exercise. As a journalism proferssor, shouldn’t he be teaching his students the sanctity of keeping a source anonymous? Gaines, in a most disngenuous way, said that Woodward and Bernstein had already identified the source by leaving all sorts of hints along the way. If they had been serious about protecting Deep Throat, they would have let him remain strictly on “deep background”—that is, not only anonymous, but entirely unsourced in print. But this is unfair and insincere. Watergate was the single biggest most celebrated triumph of investigative journalism of the last fifty years, and it would not have broken without Deep Throat. Woodward and Bernstein have been harrassed about the identity of their source from the day they begain investigating that “trivial little break-in.” The fact that they have managed to keep Deep Throat’s identity secret from everyone except the redoubtable Bill Gaines and his class is the only defense they need.

And so, in honor of Hunter S. Thompson, we have to ask—is this what journalism is about today? Has it devolved so far that it must eat its own, to keep itself occupied? To speak truth only to the truth-seekers, even when it is an irrelevant and a counterproductive exercise in navel-gazing? How depressing. We hear there’s been a lot of snow in Aspen this year—or was that merely the ashes of Harold Ross floating lightly on the air?