Dark Brown Waffles

In the summer of 2000, when I was 19, I went to work for an unnamed media organization at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. I spent three weeks working for them and made close to $3000, which I immediately turned into a car that I continue to love despite totaling it eight years ago. I genuinely still love that car.

In retrospect, the most important thing I took from that experience wasn’t the car but my first realization that the media might not be functioning in the way that a younger me imagined that it was. This realization was fueled primarily by the other interns I worked with and the media professionals that I worked for. How to put this gently: they were awful.

Sycophantic is a better word. These were people overwhelmingly obsessed with something other than gathering and reporting news. This was apparent almost immediately: we had an intern training session in which we were instructed upon the right way to put a paperclip on a packet of papers, lest the man on the television that we all ostensibly worked for burst into tears and then burst into fury. To the instructor, this was the most important consideration. When we introduced ourselves and our experiences, my meager resume (starting at 16 in the newsroom of a collegiate newspaper with a circulation of more than 15,000, winning that newspaper’s Employee of the Year award while a senior in high school, becoming the managing editor of another collegiate newspaper with a circulation of more than 15,000 while a freshmen) didn’t measure up against the kids who were going to Northwestern and Syracuse and Emory because the places I’d work and the schools I’d attended didn’t offer the status that those institutions did. The fact that I had genuine experience made me a weirdo, not a member of the club in good standing. When were offered the opportunity to go to a press conference and ask questions, fewer than half of the interns hands went up. Fewer than half of that group actually ended up going. And at the end of the assignment, when it came time to create something for the show’s website, the daughter of one of the show’s producers was chosen. Last I heard, she works somewhere in Texas doing “journalism.”

While I was there, I was reading Hunter S. Thompson, the way disaffected young people often do. I was reading Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail ‘72 which I remember as the greatest book about journalism that I’d ever read. That might not still be true although it remains my fallback position whenever the question comes up. I asked one of the older journalists who worked at the show about Thompson because I’d seen this man’s name referenced in the book and he said, “Yeah, Thompson was a wild character…” and then changed the subject as if Thompson’s name wasn’t bigger than his own. It was baffling. How could this journalist not at least admire that journalist, given what both had accomplished? But nothing.

Why write all of this? Because of this madness, an article of unabashed hogwash in what passes for an important publication. The article asks whether reporters should ask politicians to back up their claims with facts or if they should, instead, reprint claims made without question. Which, in case you’re wondering, is all that journalism is these days: sycophants worshiping the people with power, refusing to dig any deeper, refusing to report any more than what those people want reported. If it isn’t beneficial to the people with power, it damn sure isn’t appearing in a newspaper, a headline, a magazine, or anywhere else.

I know how this reads: sour grapes. My conclusions are drawn upon limited experience, to be sure. But I assure you that articles like this only reinforce my realization that so many journalists are utterly useless human beings, content simply to spend a life as a hanger-on, desperately suckling up to those with more power than themselves, dedicated to a life of preserving and defending the status quo above all other concerns.

Or, more briefly: if our political-media establishment were all suddenly whisked away to a desert island to re-enact Lord of the Flies, would any of the rest of us be any worse off than we are right now?