Editorial II
Jr, R. Emmett Tyrrell
Editorial II Gossip Slingers T HE TOOLS a man uses to procure his daily mutton are an unerringly accurate intimation of the worthiness of his calling and state in life. For instance, if a...
...Great Joy...
...Politics and Popular Government can be ordered from AEI's PubLic Policy Research, 12.50 17th Street NW, Washington, D.C...
...If any journalist admits this, by the way, his days are numbered...
...Were Girl ever to take the journalist's creed for its own, no employee of that giant corporation would ever dare to dine near an open window...
...A) It is enormously difficult to reconstruct any past event...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Now comes our colleague, George Will, who has brought together Robert Bartley of the Wail Street Journal, Paul Weaver of Harvard's Department of Government, Douglas Cater, formerly a special assistant to President Johnson, Rowland Evans, a man of words, and Irving Kristol, an obscure New York intellectual, to publish a pamphlet which takes up many of the problems inherent in the press...
...The journalist further assures us thai it is his job to tell tales that frighten little children and make grown men grieve for their country...
...When the atmosphere crackles with blame and teems with showers of guilt a calm, objective journalistic account is unlikely...
...The result is a simplistic and moralistic journalism of vociferous infallibility that: a) neglects the ambiguities and complexities of life and b) sells...
...According to this balmy syllogism, the heinous and the low are news, the sweet and the joyous are not news...
...Today the woman's page of a newspaper is apt to read as though it were written by a disciple of Goebbels...
...I To Our Readers I Good Tidings...
...Such individuals always produce misery, mischief and conturbation for the citizenry and profit for themselves...
...From the pit of my stomach flashes of premonition send forth tactical instructions to my cerebrum and I step back a bit, giving the scoundrel wide berth...
...For instance, if a man works with an array of devices including a small vial of poison, a revolver, several small utensils, blades of various lengths, a crowbar, explosives, a mask and a Book of Common Prayer, one may conclude that the livelihood of the man in question is one frowned upon by the archangels and other law-abiding citizens...
...To qualify as genuine news an event must be startling and unusual...
...Likewise if I am told that a man derives his sustenance almost exclusively from the usufruct of language my eyebrows rise instinctively...
...And how is anyone who does criticize the press ever going to be taken seriously...
...On the contrary, it is startling to hear of a man who is faithful to his wife, of a cab driver who follows the golden rule or of a public official who dies in poverty...
...Nevertheless, the editor of your home town gazette would sooner kiss a pig than dilute the lurid pages of his paper with such good tidings...
...Imagine the response if General Motors proclaimed that it built cars according to the same criterion...
...Published by the American Enterprise Institute, Press...
...That the average American journalist is a scoundrel and a self-appointed mooncef is recognized by every decent individual in society save perhaps the journalist's mother and his lawyer...
...It reinforces many of my own prejudices concerning the gossip slingers and is therefore, by my standards, first rate...
...If your address will be different this fall please let us know by using the Change of Address form which is found on page 2. Incidentally this issue is but a scanty precursor of the palmy things we have planned ~or next fall, so, lest you miss a single issue this fall, may we suggest you renew your subscription now, using the house advertisement on page 28...
...For instance ten years ago there was not much partisanship inflaming the broader questions of foreign policy and sex...
...D) Beneath the dilating politicalization there is the withering of a national consensus on the "meaning of American Society...
...C) The increased politicalization of American life has stoked the fires of bias and spread them into areas once free of politics, making authentic journalism even rarer...
...Now actually, though General Motors declares otherwise, increasing numbers of discomfited Chevrolet drivers are convinced this is exactly the criterion GM follows, and every shareholders' meeting is taking on the bloodthirsty atmosphere of a women's wrestling match or a campus teach-in...
...Just as we promised our afflicted readers last month, this is to be our last issue until October, when all of the jolly boys will return from their summer internship at the Central Intelligence Agency...
...But the laziest glance at the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times suggests that what is unusual and startling today is not rape, homicide, malfeasance, larceny and wife beating...
...Though the typical selfeffacing journalist sees himself answering a calling more sacred than that of the Peace Corps Volunteer or the conservationist, the fact is that journalists are generally a pretty raw and shady bunch, answering to no authority or set of standards that is not arrantly self-serving and hypocritical...
...The problem with American journalism is not that it is American (as some journalists would have us believe), but that it is an "ism" possessed of no theory, doctrine or system that makes any sense...
...The truth is elusive in the present and even more slippery in the past...
...I commend it to your attention...
...Yet I am willing to bet my subscription to the New york Times that the blankfaced ignorance of an Arkansas yokel is more salubrious to polity than the negative knowledge emboldening the highminded academics of our fated republic...
...F) The public's appetite for drama forces many journalists to dwell on the dramatic and neglect the commonplace...
...I can think of no other profession or craft in which the practitioners or craftsmen stake their success and probity on the claim that the consumers of their product are howling in misery...
...What would the Federal Trade Commission say...
...4 The Alternative June--September 2972...
...It has also led journalists into reporting issues and events which they are generally ill-equipped to discuss...
...However deeply one wants to plumb the matter, polarization makes the job of objective reporting that much more difficult...
...How would thai settle with Ralph Nader...
...As I see it the press' peculiar dilemma emerges from the following data...
...It seems whenever someone complains that the press is doing a shoddy, unfair or downright criminal job of distributing the gossip, the ingenius journalists leap at this criticism as irrefragable evidence that they are "on top of the news," vigilantly patrolling the commonweal...
...Words are the tools of reform politicians, used car salesmen, white slavers and journalists...
...E) Most journalists subscribe to an ideology that sees social problems as social injustices, concomittant with vast residues of guilt and blame...
...Journalists are some of the most notorious swindlers to come along since Eve...
...Only in the journalistic underworlds is it taken as a sound axiom that the journalist is sedulous in his duty when he is stirring up the populous and making the dignitaries shriek...
...We know who hounds and investigates the politicians, the union leaders, the military-industrial complex and such, but who scrutinizes the press...
...Imagine if the chairman of the board of General Motors announced solemnly that "an automobile maker is not doing his duty unless he is building cars that make people uncomfortable...
...This naturally has manifest itself in what some are given to calling "polarization...
...B) The intellectualization of the press has made it assume a tone that is artificial, "negative," and inherently biased...
Vol. 5 • June 1972 • No. 9
