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Journalism is changing. The Washington Post newsroom brawl shows just how badly some reporters are taking it.
In a bin in my attic filled with sentimental piles of junk, there is a yellowed copy of a Washington Post essay by Henry Allen. The 1997 piece, “A Capsule History of Psychiatry,” isn’t so much an article as it is a freestyle rumination about the rise of Prozac.
I vaguely remember in college experiencing the essay as a kind of a long, bizarre, free-associative trip. When it was over, I had the distinct feeling that the fact that I knew a whole family on Prozac meant that there is something deeply wrong with our society.
A lot has happened to the field of journalism since I first saw that flash of Allen’s brilliance. Given how badly a lot of macho, swashbuckling newspaperman types are coping with the changes in the newspaper industry, I can’t say I was too surprised by the latest Henry Allen headline: “Fists Fly at Washington Post.” As the Washingtonian reported, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Allen, now pushing 70, punched his reporter in the newsroom last Friday in a dispute over an article.
Although I didn’t work with him directly, I crossed paths with Allen during my stint as a staff writer in the Post’s Style section in the early 2000s. (And full disclosure: The Root is owned by the Washington Post.) But at the risk of doing the same over-analysis Allen has to countless other subjects, I think the well-publicized fight was about more than just a stupid article.
What we are watching is a whole profession losing its swagger.
The offending piece was a USA Today-style “charticle” that riffed on the news that a congressional investigation was leaked. Upon being handed the piece to edit, Allen reportedly deemed the collection of sentences “the second worst” he’s ever seen in his 43 years in journalism.
The reporter told Allen to stop being such a “cocksucker,” and then Allen, a former Marine, clocked him. The Post’s top editor was among those who broke up the fight.
Ever since news broke, the media house of mirrors has been reading all kinds of meaning into the incident. The Washingtonian account read the fisticuff as sort of a Custer’s Last Stand for journalism, the feisty geezer defending the integrity of the profession and knocking out gimmicky infotainment.
Post columnist Gene Weingarten hailed the brawl as a heroic stand for journalism with a pulse: “Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story.”
Allen, who reportedly was told never to set foot in the newsroom again, feigned shock that so many news organizations have feasted on the story. As he told Politico’s Michael Calderone: "Back when I got into journalism, the idea that a fistfight in a newsroom would turn into a news story was unthinkable," Allen said when reached Monday evening. "The guys in the sports department at the New York Daily News, they had so many, you wouldn’t even look up."
Ah, the glory days of journalism! At a luncheon at the National Press Club several years ago, I remember hearing Walter Cronkite grouse about how high-falutin the field has become. Back in his day, he said, journalists drank their lunch.
Of course, there are those who might have a different view of the newspaper industry’s so-called golden years. Take veteran Post scribe Dorothy Gilliam, who told me about integrating the Post newsroom in the late ‘50s, when she was forced to go through the back entrance to interview sources. Besides black women, there were a whole lot of folks who weren’t welcome at that particular club.
As far as I can tell, this mythical, old-school shoe leather newspaperman has not made an appearance in newsrooms for quite some time. There are some impressive holdouts, but by and large, the newsrooms I’ve worked in have been filled with overeducated suits, playing inspector general in search of the next public official to “take down” a la Watergate. The vibe is definitely more law firm than meat-packing plant.
That’s why it’s been so interesting to watch the existential crisis that the nation’s largest newsrooms have experienced, now that driving information around in trucks is not the best way to inform the public. Thanks to the Internet, the haughtiness that journalists once got from knowing more than everyone else has all but vanished. As even the New York Times struggles to hold back the Internet tsunami, it can no longer pretend that it has “all the news that’s fit to print”—or click.
Meanwhile, the general public seems all too happy to watch all those arrogant pricks with press passes finally get their comeuppance. (Sorry, David Simon, there will be no elegy for the ink-stained folks.)
The Post newsroom will be poorer without Allen’s stealth bullshit detection. But I’m not crying about it. The high-minded principles of the Fourth Estate will live on. Thanks to technology and globalization, the voices from the margin are moving toward the center. It is scary and bumpy new terrain. But it also means there are more outlets than ever for off-beat voices. Voices like that of the great Henry Allen.
Natalie Hopkinson is associate editor of The Root. Follow her on Twitter.
Comments
My my! Such behavior in an elitist newspaper like the Post. I just hope that the Wall Street Journal Reporters act a ,little more genteel in their newsroom behavior. If not, then this Republican would be really upset.
My my! Such behavior in an elitist newspaper like the Post. I just hope that the Wall Street Journal Reporters act a ,little more genteel in their newsroom behavior. If not, then this Republican would be really upset.
My my! Such behavior in an elitist newspaper like the Post. I just hope that the Wall Street Journal Reporters act a ,little more genteel in their newsroom behavior. If not, then this Republican would be really upset.
...of everything.
It's quite unfortunate that most of Gen Y is so cleverly raised to play mini legal eagles ever sense they were small that they grow up so inclined to want everything so neat that messyness is foreign to them of natural passion and complexity with nuance. I've learned the hard way in that the younger generations are pretty much so people who are trying very hard to be something they cannot connect to because of all the policed behavior to perform "perfect". They hate grit and they are suspicious of guts. They like marketing and feel good marketing schemes. They don't understand what true grit is because they have all had their parents buying their ways into competitions/competitiveness. Anything too organic threatens their existence.
It's just not journalism that this is happening in. This is the effects of the PC Culture growing up and entering the workforce.
I've seen a number of twenty-somethings literally want to quit jobs because older people curse around them. I have had to whisper to older employees that the little kids (Black and White) are seriously threatening to go to HR to complain about their candor which before they, the young people, arrived was fine in the culture. It made me just in my thirties realized how inauthentic I have to be to make sure the babies feel fine. So much is ready and in place to protect them and put anything older out to pasture because we are not PC enough...not neutured enough. So what we have is a less passionate office and more of a generation divide with the Gen Xers identifying with the Boomers who we don't really care to support that much anyway because they created this culture of the Echo Boomers running us all out of being real and feeling safe to have guts, to make mistakes, and explore passion.
AmericanToTheCore
No it's dying slowly but surely, being a pro and being objective was the rules you were supposed to live by. When Fox News, MSNBC, and every opinionated hack at a rag can sit there and manipulate the facts and put themselves in the lime light and go unchallenged, the art is dying.
NOW...instead a' punchin' out da lowly hacks dat AREN'T even worthy a' yer time nor attention...HOW'Z about knockin' out yer "editors", the publishers, and owners of theze so-call'd "news"papers!
...n' YES...We HERE 2 HELP do EXACTLY Dat!!
We ALWAYZ thought dat the inwhitey/nyt/new york times "slogan" really SHOULD read:
"All the "news" our money sees fit to print. And nothing else!"
Well...Da TIMEZ THEY ARE, indeed, A-CHANGIN'!
Blogz n' other new media toolz are renderin' theze POMPOUS fools TOTALLY irrelevant...so much so dat SOON they'll ALL hafta go out and find REAL jobs. = )
...n' dat INCLUDEZ da folks @ the big city dailies AND the LOSERS @ other similarly BOGUS operationz like the san francisco comical/chronicle n' other yellow journalism rags!!{ ( 8K
Pritty SOON...We WON'T EVEN botha 2 post here n' will DEDICATE Ourselvez 2 BUILDIN' Our Own Blog into da POWERHouse dat'z gonna REPLACE all these self-aggrandizin', self-servin', celebrity non-news sycophants!
HTTP://theblackwhole.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/rebel-ghetto-messiah/
--TBW
Out of character with his writing, Henry Allen neglected to professionally "over-analyze" the situation prior to clocking the reporter. Oddly, though an ex-Marine, Allen most certainly heard that reporter's epithet applied to him during boot camp. Both were wrong, should shake hands and get on with the hard nosed that is, ah, reporting.
Henry Allen's punchout of a writer is an almost laughable tempest compared to the multitude of scandals that have simmered in big city newsrooms for decades. In my time at the WP I was dismayed at the way Ben Bradlee handled (?) the infamous vigilante episode, targeting a black reporter. Of course even the WP sins are far down on the scale compared to the New York daily where there was an ugly coverup of a vehicular homicide involving a star reporter ( who was subsequently repeatedly promoted).
A lot of the negative stuff raining on the industry generally is nothing less than the very kind of divine retribution that we've seen inflicted on the Catholic Church, which for decades covered up priest sexcapades with children.
As for the newspaper industry, there are larger darker clouds gathering and in the near future Americans will come to see that a potentially wonderful craft was really a cauldron of unspeakable scandals.
One need not be a Marine (there are no "ex" Marines that I'm aware of) to object to being called a cocksucker. And the objection taking the form of a thrown fist should not be a surprise. I'd have done the same thing and, upon being told to leave, would have thrown my computer through the human resources director's window while dancing a boogie on my way out to my car.
What does that have to do with journalism? Nothing. Henry Allen's original comment about the unsatisfactory material may have been a comment on the kind of head-of-the-beer stuff that seem to be more in demand these days, or it may have been a comment on the writer's ineptness. But the punch was the response to an insult.
Even the courts recognize that there are "fighting words."
Cinmike, I respectfully disagree. Journalism IS changing. Yes, one form is dying; but another is taking shape and will soon be born. Let's hope we like what we get but, as with all things democracy-based, we get what we deserve. The only thing that really (and I mean really) bothers me is the current concentration on celebrity-goings on. Like who cares! Someone has a baby, someone is cheating on a spouse, a fight breaks out, someone dresses like they threw on something from the rag bag. Really? Walk down any street in America and see/hear the same things. Just because they're "known names" doesn't make it important, and we don't need to know. It's certainly not "news", just self-important, self-serving posturing by people who cover the same kind of self-serving people: they feed each others' egos.
One thing the changing, or dying, journalism is exposing is just how much ignorance is out there, and how many fools are believing it. I don't know how to protect integrity; do you? I can only protect my own at this point. Because it's up to us. An America without a Free Press is unimaginable, unthinkable, unworkable, really. We need information, and we need to be able to trust it.