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It’s no secret that journalism is in tatters, undermined at the bottom by the decline of local news reporting and at the top by elite hobnobbing and foundation dollars. In this situation, journalists have a responsibility to ignore the trappings of partisan praise and attack the powers that be.
On the spring equinox I went to see the man on the mountain. Seymour Hersh did not know I was coming, and after a wary nod from his wife, he exploded out the front door and asked, “What the fuck is wrong with you? What happened? Did you watch All the President's Men too many times? Write me an email like a normal person. I’m not going to reward this fucking behavior. Think of a question and ask me a question in an email. Has door knocking ever worked for you?” (Yes.) “Well, it's not working now!” (Slam.)
On the bus ride up the hill I had pictured a buddy montage unspooling. Laughing over beers, combing through old files, and downloading the teachings of the master. I had gone to see the old man not only to say I had, but also because no one at my magazine had the key to smoking out stories in the twenty-first century. I’d done okay poring over public records and cold-calling hundreds of officials, but there had to be an easier way, a secret way. When I was asked to write this article on “journalistic responsibility,” I thought of getting chewed out by Sy.
But before getting into why and what should be done, it's worth persecuting the mainstream media once more for old times’ sake. There isn’t one journalism these days, but scattered islets in an increasingly unprofitable archipelago. Each is laden with different rules and failings. There is a corpse-ridden no-man's land of pock-marked small town papers, their metropolitan elders fully desiccated, if not squeaking by, with a few raspy op-eds a week. The Boston Globe fits this category, as will the Washington Post by the time this article hits print. Then you have the big digital players whose ratings are also in the ditch: CNN, NBC, ABC. The Vox consortium of anemic entertainment media. There are the gasping left-wing magazines of New York and the wizened remains of the New Republic, all of which have given up on breaking news, choosing instead to offer insipid commentary in pre-packaged cartons of left, pretty left, and very left.
There are the startups: cynical vultures like Semafor, Punchbowl, and Puck, raising big dollars from the likes of bloodthirsty gulf monarchs, venture capitalists, and the writhing lobbyist hordes of Washington. There are the good, the bad and the ugly on Substack: my former colleagues Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein punching above their weight, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss shrieking banshee-like into the void, and various flavors of monstrous cringe—Harry Potter fan fiction, hyper-sonic #Resistance-core, and a small army of elite-spawned sojourners aiming telescopic lenses at two piss-stained blocks on the outskirts of Chinatown.
And at the top of the food chain remain the Ivy league dandy fuckers. In this court sit the demonic squinty-eyed avatars of the New Yorker, the graying zombies of the grey lady, and the squeaky clean nerds at Propublica who, in all fairness, manage some solid reporting between hall monitor badge-shining and Pulitzer Committee meat-riding. But even this prestige class appears flagging as sheet-pan weeknight recipes and Supreme Court exposés ring hollow under the shadow of Trump II.
There are the good, the bad and the ugly on Substack: my former colleagues Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein punching above their weight, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss shrieking banshee-like into the void, and various flavors of monstrous cringe—Harry Potter fan fiction, hyper-sonic #Resistance-core, and a small army of elite-spawned sojourners aiming telescopic lenses at two piss-stained blocks on the outskirts of Chinatown.
