Fear and Loathing: ‘Kazika the Mad Jap’ Could Not Be Reached for Comment

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Here’s a headline:

What Happens to Journalists When No One
Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?
As newsrooms disappear, veteran older reporters
are being forced from the profession.
That’s bad for journalism — and democracy.

Please shut up. Nobody feels sorry for you, and probably nobody should. The idea that people are entitled to be employed in whatever field they choose to pursue, and that once they get hired, they then have a “right” to keep that job — that is what’s bad for democracy.

Newspapers were my life for more than 20 years. Deadline after deadline after deadline — from 1986 to 2008, that’s what it was about. From the day I talked myself into a job as a $4.50-an-hour staff writer at a tiny weekly in Austell, Georgia, until the day I quit the Washington Times after a decade as assistant national editor and Culture page editor, my life was all about deadlines. It was a job I loved except for when I hated it, but one scam I never bought into was the lofty illusion cherished by the Professional Journalism types who insisted that the rotten pay and miserable working conditions of the typical newspaper reporter were justified because we were doing What’s Good For Democracy.

Bovine excrement.

We were doing what was good for the advertisers and the publisher, and any benefit to Democracy was strictly incidental. Long before the Internet made it possible to have “metrics,” as they say, of reader interest, I realized that there was a disconnect between (a) the average journalist’s conception of his job, and (b) what most readers actually wanted to read. Two or three decades ago, there was a lot of puffy nonsense — the kind of stuff you’d read in Columbia Journalism Review or the monthly American Society of News Editors (ASNE) bulletin — about “community service” and “investigative journalism” and so forth, all of which amounted to your mother telling you to eat your broccoli.

Every major metro daily in the country was piling manpower into the kind of five-part “investigative” series (or “enterprise journalism”) cynics used to call “Pulitzer bait.” This always seemed to involve a pet liberal crusade — racism, environmentalism, homelessness, etc. — that would appeal to the sensibilities of the Professional Journalism types who think of their jobs as What’s Good For Democracy: “Eat your broccoli.”

Supply, Demand and Lunatic Gibberish

OK, so what if the readers didn’t want broccoli? What if what they wanted was, y’know, actual news? Or sports — which was my gig for about five years, and I don’t mean to brag, but I was good at it. Developing reader loyalty requires thinking: What does the reader want to read?

Hunter S. Thompson understood this completely:

There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence…. At one point, in Florida, I was writing variations on the same demented themes for three competing papers at the same time, under three different names. I was a sports columnist for one paper in the morning, sports editor for another in the afternoon, and at night I worked for a pro wrestling promoter, writing incredibly twisted “press releases” that I would plant, the next day, in both papers.
It was a wonderful gig, in retrospect, and at times I wish I could go back to it — just punch a big hatpin through my frontal lobes and maybe regain that happy lost innocence that enabled me to write, without the slightest twinge of conscience, things like: “The entire Fort Walton Beach police force is gripped in a state of fear this week; all leaves have been canceled and Chief Bloor is said to be drilling his men for an Emergency Alert situation on Friday and Saturday nights — because those are the nights when ‘Kazika, The Mad Jap,’ a 440-pound sadist from the vile slums of Hiroshima, is scheduled to make his first — and no doubt his last — appearance in Fish-head Auditorium. Local wrestling impressario Lionel Olay is known to have spoken privately with Chief Bloor, urging him to have ‘every available officer’ on duty at ringside this weekend, because of the Mad Jap’s legendary temper and his invariably savage reaction to racial insults. Last week, in Detroit, Kazika ran amok and tore the spleens out of three ringside spectators, one of whom allegedly called him a ‘yellow devil.'”
“Kazika,” as I recall, was a big, half-bright Cuban who once played third-string tackle for Florida State University in Tallahassee, about 100 miles away — but on the fish-head circuit he had no trouble passing for a dangerous Jap strangler, and I soon learned that pro wrestling fans don’t give a fuck anyway.

This is exactly right. Action, Color, Speed, Violence — write something the reader enjoys reading. He wants personalities and action, and your job is to find Kazika the Mad Jap, the star of the show. In Gordon County, Georgia, circa 1990, this might have been Timmy Star, power forward for Fairmount High, but in Rome, Georgia, circa 1993, it was a Floyd County commissioner who fought a tooth-and-nail battle over local sales taxes. All that ridiculous Pulitzer-bait eat-your-broccoli five-part-series crap that the ASNE bulletin and the Columbia Journalism Review took so seriously? Readers generally hated that stuff, and I didn’t blame them.

Does anyone remember Bill Kovach? He was Washington bureau chief for the New York Times before the idiots in charge at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution hired Kovach to turn their paper into . . .

Well, broccoli. Because broccoli’s Good for Democracy.

Kovach spent two years as editor and damned near ruined the Atlanta papers with his pretentious (but Pulitzer Prize-winning) ideas about publishing broccoli journalism. During his tenure, Kovach not only alienated many readers, he also lost sight of the fact that in Atlanta, the business community expects the local newspaper to act as a publicity agent. Atlanta was famous during the Civil Rights era as “The City Too Busy to Hate,” because civic leaders recognized that racial conflict was bad for business. Cynics observed that, in truth, Atlanta was The City Too Greedy to Care. If Jim Crow was good for business, Atlanta would be segregated, and if Jim Crow proved to be a net liability, Atlanta would integrate peaceably, but either way, what the Chamber of Commerce wanted, the Chamber of Commerce got. Labels like “liberal”and “conservative” didn’t have a damned thing to do with these entirely pragmatic and self-interested calculations. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, the only color that really matters in Atlanta is green.

Well, Mr. Kovach didn’t quite understand this worldview, and he managed to piss off the Chamber of Commerce, and in November 1988, he “resigned,” officially, but everyone knew it was more like he got pushed out the door, and there ensued all kinds of hand-wringing and moaning from the Good for Democracy types.

This drew a sarcastic retort from the newspaper’s most popular columnist, Lewis Grizzard, who wrote that the paper would be better off without Kovach, “with apologies to those who enjoy exhaustive series on what’s doing in Africa.” Grizzard’s jab was aimed at Kovach’s nutty idea that because (a) Atlanta had a large black population, therefore (b) the paper should have lots of coverage of news in Africa. This was deemed an enlightened and sophisticated attitude by the Good for Democracy crowd, or you might view it as condescending and vaguely racist.

Many white Southerners are of Scots-Irish ancestry, but Kovach didn’t start filling the pages of the Atlanta papers with daily updates from Belfast or Edinburgh. No, if the IRA set off a bomb, the paper would run a four-paragraph item from the Associated Press on page A7, and otherwise the only news from the ancestral homeland was the sports-page coverage of the British Open at the Royal St. Andrews.

Identity politics and liberal notions of “diversity” have so polluted the journalism racket that now even the sports pages are full of “social justice.” If there is a gay outfielder playing for some AA farm team anywhere in America, all he has to do is send an email to Sports Illustrated and they’ll run a 6,000-word feature about his courageous struggle against homophobia in Dubuque or Albuquerque or wherever.

Whether or not broccoli journalism is Good for Democracy, it’s not good for journalism, because people get tired of being told what to think.

A newsroom is not a pulpit, and editors are not theologians, and if you want to preach a sermon by disguising it as a five-part investigative series about homelessness or whatever, you might eventually find yourself preaching to an empty church, because readers are not entirely stupid. Your pretentious attitude as Our Moral Superiors™ is tiresome and obnoxious, and people won’t pay money to be treated like third-graders being scolded by their teacher. But I digress . . .

Blame Al Gore, Because Why Not?

When Bill Kovach decided circa 1987 that the Atlanta papers needed a bureau in Nairobi, he could afford to do it, because the paper was making a handsome profit from advertising revenue. The fact that advertising ultimately paid the bills — the source of revenue, whereas the salaries of the newsroom staff were an expense — was an aspect of journalism that a lot of Good for Democracy types never really figured out. Bottom-line considerations were far from the minds of most people in our nation’s newsrooms 25 years ago, before Al Gore invented the Internet, and then some guy named Matt Drudge became America’s Editor-in-Chief.

Oh, the pages and pages of classified ads — help wanted, real estate, used cars, whatever — that were once such a magnificent revenue generator for newspaper publishers. Oh, the display ads from department stores, and the full-color advertising inserts stuffed inside that thick Sunday paper. Nearly all gone now — gone with the wind, along with the fat profit margins that allowed Bill Kovach the luxury of force-feeding readers in Atlanta their journalistic broccoli about the famine in Sudan. Gone, those glory days when newsrooms were so crowded, and every major metropolitan paper had an “investigative journalism” team of a half-dozen hotshots whose bylines rarely appeared in print except on those tedious five-part series written for the eyes of the Pulitzer Prize judges.

Yeah, once upon a time, every newspaper in every state capital in America — from Tallahassee to Juneau, from Augusta, Maine, to Honolulu, Hawaii — had its own local crew of would-be Woodward and Bernsteins who believed they were producing journalism that was Good for Democracy.

Gone! All gone now! And nobody gives a damn, except crybabies like Dale Maharidge, the journalism professor at Columbia University who wrote that idiotic headline: “What Happens to Journalists When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?” Oh, the AFL-CIO to the rescue!

As digital journalism finds its place in the new-media landscape, helped by a crop of new web-only publications, younger journalists are beginning to demand the kind of work protections, decent wages and newsroom solidarity that many of their older counterparts once enjoyed. In the past year, workers have voted to unionize at Gawker, Vice, Salon and ThinkProgress, affiliating with the Writers Guild of America East, AFL-CIO. In January,The Huffington Post’s management voluntarily recognized the WGAE to represent 262 employees. The union negotiates “compensation, benefits, and job security” for its members.

Isn’t that nice? The “workers . . . voted to unionize at Gawker,” which just got hit with a $115 million judgment after former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan sued them for publishing a sex video of him. Delicious irony.

“Kazika the Mad Jap” could not be reached for comment.

Is my blog Good for Democracy? Probably not, but please remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

UPDATE: Welcome, Vox Day readers!

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And, yes, Hunter S. Thompson had a very low opinion of journalism professors:

In the context of journalism, here, we are dealing with a new kind of “lead” — the Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote. The Columbia Journalism Review will never sanction it; at least not until the current editor dies of brain syphilis, and probably not even then.
What?
Do we have a libel suit on our hands?
Probably not, I think, because nobody in his right mind would take a thing like that seriously — and especially not that gang of senile hags who run the Columbia Journalism Review, who have gone to considerable lengths in every issue during the past year or so to stress, very heavily, that nothing I say should be taken seriously.
“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” George Bernard Shaw said that, for good or ill, and I only mention it here because I’m getting goddamn tired of being screeched at by waterheads. Professors are a sour lot, in general, but professors of journalism are especially rancid in their outlook because they have to wake up every morning and be reminded once again of a world they’ll never know.

The Great Shark Hunt, p. 286.

UPDATE III: Linked at American Power — thanks! — and now a thread at Memeorandum.

UPDATE IV: Linked by Larwyn at Director Blue — thanks!

 


120 comments

  1. Excellent take, Mr. McCain.

    Shortly after I started blogging in 2005, some of my friends and e•friends thought I should take time to get press credentials so my political blog could be “serious press.”

    I took a hard look, and found I could count on one hand the places that would take my kind of story. Then I realized it had been years since I actually read a paper. Drudge spoiled that for me. I hadn’t relied on TV news since 9-11, Who has time to waste with the filler for one or two stories that might tell you something you didn’t already know?

    Even then the trend was clear. News would show up in the NYT first, then the national TV news, then the major papers, then the local news, and finally the not major papers. Since I wasn’t interested in most of the news, why should I compete with all the fluff on the off chance I might be picked up by a Big Name?

    Somehow it wasn’t worth it.

  2. Back when I was a kid in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, I had paper routes delivering the morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader, but the Commonwealth’s “newspaper of record,” such as it was, was the Louisville Courier-Journal. The Courier-Journal was printed on a special paper, which we described as soft enough to wipe your . . . well, you get the idea.

    I moved away from the Bluegrass State in December of 1984; it was a beautiful state with no decent jobs. I hadn’t seen a copy of the Courier-Journal since the 80s, and then, while visiting my best friend in Louisville, I finally saw a copy, thirty years later.

    It was amazing how far downhill it had gone. It was reduced to a smaller size, and the entire national news sections had been replaced with USA Today; Gannett had bought out the Courier-Journal, and was doing everything it could to reduce costs.

    It wasn’t just the Courier-Journal which has suffered: all of the dailies have. Since I’ve been in Pennsylvania, The Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the great metropolitan dailies, has been through two — or is it three? — bankruptcies, the last bankruptcy sale being about one-fifth of the previous purchase price.

    In the end, newspapers are 18th century technology, trying desperately to figure out a new business model to survive in the 21st. Specialized content sources, such as The Wall Street Journal, are doing so, but for most, it’s a slow spiral toward death. There is no story in the Inquirer that I cannot read for free online, so there’s no particular reason for me to pay for it.

    My best friend still subscribes to the Courier-Journal, because he just likes the feel of the print edition; that is what he is used to reading, that is what is familiar to him. He is also 62 years old, and really part of the next to last generation to depend on newspapers. As Thulsa Doom said to Conan, in the movie Conan the Barbarian, “When I am gone, you will have never been.”

  3. While Dale Maharidge laments the demise of the print newspapers, part of what is being lamented is the loss of the editorial gatekeeping function of the professional media. What our esteemed host has written about feminism would never have been printed in the Washington Times at which he was once employed, and even Twitter has banned him.

    Yet what he has written is now being seen, in public, because the internet has killed that gatekeeping function; all that Mr McCain needs to do is pay his site hosting service the annual fees they charge — for which he would like you to hit the fornicating tip jar — and his powerful prose is available to anyone who cares to look, with the only gatekeeping function being whether he writes well enough to get people to read his works.

    Mr Maharidge’s piece is being published in The Nation, itself a dying periodical, just like The New Republic, among others.

  4. The LGP (Local Gannett Paper) phenomenon emerged in the 1990s as a bane for local readers, but a (largely imaginary) salvation for small-town journalists. Rumors that such-and-so nearby paper had been bought by Gannett would kindle chatter in the newsroom that hey, maybe Gannett would buy “our” paper, too. And then, it was imagined, everybody’s pay would increase, and maybe their excellence would be recognized and — zoom! — they’d be writing for USA Today. Or so a lot of people seemed to imagine, although it never actually happened that way and my bet is that almost all of those people left the journalism business at least 15 years ago.

  6. No profession spends more time navel gazing and pondering their essential value to democracy than journalists.

    It would had gotten old even before they whored themselves out to the DNC.

  7. The slow-motion demise of newspapers is the result of progress; surely, as progressives, the left should welcome this, right?

  10. How many of them were banned by Twitter? It is a sign they think you’re a threat (but like bullies they are targeting medium sized bloggers like you and Milo before taking on bigger targets).

  11. I urge everyone to read the 1956 book Magazines in the 20th Century by Theodore Peterson. It’s available as a PDF for free from Brown U Library so I imagine it’s out of copyright. It is a history of American magazines mostly 1900-55 from a neutral point of view and full of amazing stats and insights into a bygone era. Most importantly, it reminds us of the amazing dynamics which can occur when a magazine finds a general audience and makes enough money to hire great minds. Today, this is rocket science.

    Today we are awash in amateurs and semi-pros who subsidize and popularize mediocrity at all levels of pop culture. Meanwhile they laugh at the supposedly conformist magazines which gave us Jack London and amazing illustrators like Edwin Georgi, not to mention a line-up of great photographers. Today, you’ll notice many news outlets saying “send us your video and photos.” That’s actually a con to build up private stock images for free. We have created a reverse culture where a single film is the audience and the audience the film. Not exactly compelling, as it’s the equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock filming a sandwich he just made.

  12. I see it somewhat differently if you go back further in time. This insane feminism never could’ve existed prior to 1960 for the simple fact we weren’t so stupid and gullible as a nation. If it had existed, I certainly think an expose of the madhouse gripping our colleges would’ve been printed rather than providing covering fire, which is what the media does today. We weren’t a nation of fat people who went to Las Vegas or a store in their pajamas.

  13. While I don’t know whether Woodard and Bernstein became journalists to ”change the world” or ”make a difference” the way they did it was by chasing the biggest national story of the 70s. They didn’t ”make the story” or more commonly today ”make up the story”

  16. Thanks for the included tweet, Stacy. Loved the article. Your experience in the “biz” shines in this context.

  18. When I was a junior in high school, I wrote for a local weekly. On Memorial Day week, we started a food section, and I got to write 1000 words about homemade ice cream makers and recipes. I interviewed my mother who hosted a church ice cream social every summer. In the article, I had a throw-away slam at store bought ice cream. The editor called me in and told me that joke was gone. Why? We’d convinced the local grocery to buy an insert with a zillion coupons for ice cream. The editor’s words: “The first rule in journalism is never, ever piss off the advertisers.

  19. Rod Serling had a scene cut out of one of his ’50s teleplays where someone used a match. Zippo lighters was a sponsor. Another of his shows had a scene asking for tea on a British navel vessel cut out. They had a coffee sponsor.

  20. Yale wasn’t America, and the fact the book was written proves my point. What bigwig writer has the gonads to do that today? Where’s Matt Taibbi’s surgical wit and insight into the Mizzou extortion racket? SF writers are all too willing to write non-fiction pieces about fearing the oligarchy precisely because there is nothing to fear. Meanwhile they censor themselves from offending their feminist colleagues out of pure fear. Gays and artists prank Jesus in exact proportion to where real oppression resides: Islam. There was no such fear in the old days. Sanity ruled.

  21. Peterson also points out we had no national newspaper back then; magazines served that function.

  25. In the interest of Engineering Efficiency™, You probably should have a macro on your keyboard that inserts that last phrase and put it in all of your posts.

  27. Matt Taibbi’s surgical wit is surgical if you consider a machete a scalpel. Like so many hard leftists, Taibbi’s rep is utterly overblown. Even his sense of humor is sophomoric, at best. I remember his columns in “The Exile” years ago. His column was uniformly the worst thing they published.

  28. I quit newspapers in the late 90s when I found I was able to get it all on the net. The only TV I watched was Christian TV, and now I don’t even watch that as everything I could see there I can get on the net and at my convenience. Both TV and newspapers are on borrowed time.

  29. Worse than John Dolan’s D&D inspired tripe in “The War Nerd” column? That’s a pretty high bar.

  32. Side note: Neither Dubuque nor Albuquerque has a AA baseball club; the Albuquerque Isotopes are the AAA farm club of the Colorado Rockies, and Dubuque hasn’t had a team since 1976.

  33. It’s hard to keep track of the minor league farm teams, and harder yet to track the independent leagues. My word, half the leagues I covered in the old Rebel Baseball Review between 1995-2001 no longer even exist.

  34. Yea, verily. The only reason I knew this is because my local AAA club (farm team of the Los Angeles Dodgers) plays in the PCL against the Isotopes and several others, and that got me curious enough to go look up and see if the Midwest League still had a team in Dubuque.

  35. I started using Drudge and other online sites for news right after the blue dress thing. I think that was 1995.

    At home I hardly use regular TV at all, I use Netflix and Apple’s services. I think I still have the final three or so Mythbusters episodes to watch. Even then, it’s mainly for the sound.

  37. No irrational hatred of Broccoli. Just a passionate H8tey H8tred of the stuff. It’s one thing on which I and George H.W. Bush agree.

  38. I’m guessing their judgment in publishing Taibbi is one of the reasons they are no longer in their glory days.

  39. At least much of Dolan’s stuff was laughable. Taibbi’s was just worst than idiotic. He’s like most of the idiots on the left that think they are god’s gift to journalism. He’s simply a legend in his own mind.

  40. The last time I used TV for the sound was during first year back at Engineering School and I had my 4″ B&W TV tuned to CNN for reporting on Desert Shield and Storm. I finally ended up turning it off, unplugging it and putting it away. It got to be too much of distraction. I was interested mainly because some friends had orders to go. Those got canceled as the Regulars didn’t want any National Guard Units among them.

  41. Well, I wrote “Dubuque” — a funny-sounding town — and then thought, “What’s another out-of-the-way sounding place that also sounds funny?” Albuquerque instantly sprang to mind, perhaps because that’s where Bugs Bunny must have taken a wrong turn. Anyway, the thought of looking up to see whether or not either town actually had a minor-league team (or what division) didn’t cross my mind because “or whatever” was intended to convey the idea that I was just naming off places.

    But your attention to detail is appreciated, and if you know any gay minor-league outfielders (or infielders, or pitchers) who need some free publicity, please pass along my suggestion that they email Sports Illustrated immediately.

    Now that I think of it, however, maybe some shrewd heterosexual minor-leaguers could just pretend to be gay and do a sort of Sokal hoax.

  42. But both towns have lots of q’s in their names, which positively correlates with the gay struggle against the cruel, cruel world.

  44. Why is it that so-called progressives always want to live in a hermetically sealed world?

    Starving tribes in the Amazon who would like to join modernity? Sorry, buddy. You’re gonna live like that forever because we need someone to feel superior to.

  45. […] This is exactly right. Action, Color, Speed, Violence — write something the reader enjoys reading. He wants personalities and action, and your job is to find Kazika the Mad Jap, the star of the show. In Gordon County, Georgia, circa 1990, this might have been Timmy Star, power forward for Fairmount High, but in Rome, Georgia, circa 1993, it was a Floyd County commissioner who fought a tooth-and-nail battle over local sales taxes. All that ridiculous Pulitzer-bait eat-your-broccoli five-part-series crap that the ASNE bulletin and the Columbia Journalism Review took so seriously? Readers generally hated that stuff, and I didn’t blame them. […]

  46. I used to scan Drudge at least occasionally, but I’ve been put off a bit by his over the top shilling for Trump and blackout of Cruz coverage.

  50. I worked there for two years until I went to college. It was piece work–$5.00 per article, $5.00 per photo that were used. I mostly wrote about sports, and I had a press pass which got me into all the high school events for free. My editor, who was also the owner of the paper at the ancient age of 30, raised his eyebrows at the number of girls. gymnastics articles and photos I submitted. He told me, “we’ve got a pool going on when you’ll submit an article about girls’ shot-put. I took ‘never.'”

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