Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

Of Lawyers, Samoans and Journalism

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Over the weekend, I wrote:

What is terrorism? It is the use of violence for political purposes, and is akin to guerrilla warfare — “insurgency,” as we are now wont to call it.

My use of the word “wont” in that sentence drew praise in the comments from my old friend Bert the Samoan lawyer:

Also, beautiful use of “wont.” The Bunhead would be proud.

“The Bunhead” is a reference to Mrs. Opal Lovett, an English instructor at Jacksonville (Alabama) State University who taught both Bert and me back in the day. Mrs. Lovett wore her hair in a bun, as did all proper old-fashioned Southern ladies back in the day. There were many such old-fashioned Southern ladies among the teachers of our youth. For example, my homeroom teacher in seventh grade was Mrs. Alexander, who spoke in a very deep drawl, more common in the coastal lowlands of the South than in the Piedmont region near Atlanta where I grew up. One of my childhood friends liked to tell about the time when Mrs. Alexander, offended by the smell of some students’ inadequate hygiene, briefly lectured a classroom about their “foul body odors,” which with her drawling voice struck my friend as hysterically comical.

Mrs. Alexander was the wife of Robert Alexander, who was principal of Turner Middle School at the time. His long and distinguished career as an educator in Douglas County made him the namesake of Alexander High School. When there was recently a sex scandal at Alexander High that made national headlines, I felt that scandal rather personally, having known the man for whom the school was named. Such behavior is unworthy of anyone associated with that name. But I digress . . .

JSU student newspaper staffer, 1983.

Bert the Samoan Lawyer will attest that, in my youth, I wasn’t much concerned with propriety and reputation, to put it mildly. Had there been a vote for “Most Likely to Become a Conservative Pundit,” certainly no one would have nominated me. While I showed some penchant for feature writing, as entertainment editor of the student newspaper at JSU, I had no interest in politics. It was Mrs. Lovett, in fact, who suggested to me my senior year that I should take some assignments writing regular news, sports, etc., in order to accumulate clippings that would demonstrate my ability to do different kinds of journalism. Almost by accident, after a couple of post-collegiate years doing various other things — nightclub DJ, forklift driver, rock-and-roll bands — I stumbled into a $4.50-an-hour entry-level job as a staff writer for a weekly paper in Austell, Georgia, and from there slowly worked my way up the ladder until I landed at the Washington Times in 1997.

“Writing is a skill, not a talent, and this difference is important because a skill can be improved by practice.”

That’s one of my quotes someone collected online, and a point that needs to be emphasized. At a family reunion down in Alabama many years ago, one of my great-aunts or distant cousins asked me what I was doing, and when I told her I was working for a newspaper, she replied, “Oh, you were always so creative!” Well, perhaps so, but newspaper reporting isn’t about “creativity.” In fact, it’s quite the opposite — in this business, you get fired for “creating” anything (e.g., Stephen Glass).

It is kind of weird, when you think about it, that we should regard the ability to write narrative prose as a creative talent akin to composing symphonies or carving statues. However good any journalist may be at his craft, he isn’t Mozart or Michelangelo. Grant that there is some element of innate aptitude involved in journalism, but merely being able to write a news story about a school board meeting — the kind of stuff a local newspaper reporter does — isn’t a “talent,” it’s a skill. Having started my career on the very lowest rung of the ladder, I was keenly aware that improving my skill was the key to getting ahead, and I consciously committed to improvement: Work harder, work faster, get better every day — but never let ’em see you sweat.

Eric “Otter” Stratton is my role model here. When he’s practicing golf with his Animal House brother Boon, there’s this colloquy:

Boon: “I gotta work on my game.”
Otter: “No, no, no, don’t think of it as work. The whole point is just to enjoy yourself.”

Treat your “work” as fun, and strive to make it seem you achieve success effortlessly. Those other guys, half-assing their way through life? They’re not even in the building when you’re burning the midnight oil, cranking it out in a desperate rush to meet your next deadline. You don’t owe them anything, especially not an explanation of why you’re better than them. You earned what you got, and if they envy the apparent ease of your success — imagining you’re just lucky — why let them in on your secret?

There was a time in the 1980s, when Bert the Samoan Lawyer was editor of a small newspaper in Alabama, and I was driving a forklift, and how I envied him! Even though Bert explained that it was a crappy job — overworked and underpaid — still it was obviously more prestigious than what I was doing, and I was surprised when he later quit the newspaper business and went to law school. Probably I should have heeded his warning about conditions in the journalism racket. There have definitely been times I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have stuck to driving a forklift. However, Bert became a remarkable success as a lawyer, and on occasion has provided me with very valuable legal advice, free of charge. Somehow or other, the envious shoe got switched to the other foot, and Bert has from time to time expressed the idea that my Gonzo adventures in journalism are a greater achievement than his lofty status as the most eminent Polynesian-American attorney in the Southeast.

Being a great lawyer involves a lot of writing, and Bert’s scholarly work has been featured in a number of legal journals, although such writing doesn’t afford him much opportunity to display his penchant for satirical humor, for which he was well-known in his JSU years. The Bunhead taught us well, in terms of grammar and such, and Bert was always a more diligent student than I, whose collegiate career was an extended party occasionally interrupted by attending classes. There are some who have accused me of engaging in satire, of being “creative” in my writing, an allegation I strenuously deny. Believe it or not, there are some people who have gone so far as to insinuate that Bert is not even a Samoan, but trust me — I report only the facts. As is my wont.

Yes, it can be used as a noun, too. Class dismissed!



 

Methods of Journalism 301

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Welcome to J-School, boys and girls, and before we start today’s lesson, somebody needs to hit the tip jar for $16.04, for reasons to be explained later. This morning I had an online colloquy with my friend Ladd Ehlinger over the merits of When Harry Met Sally. It was Ladd’s contention that, as a director, Rob Reiner had never produced a masterpiece, to which my rejoinder was that he needed to rewatch that movie, which is certainly one of the best romantic comedies of all time. As much as we all despise Reiner’s left-wing politics, it seems to me wrong to deny him credit for that. Ehlinger shot back with some argle-bargle technical/artistic stuff, to which I replied, “Film school.”

What you have just witnessed, class, was my attempt at what Hunter S. Thompson called the Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote — the lead being a bizarre digression apparently irrelevant to the actual subject , ending with an admission of failure before continuing onward to compile your notes into some semblance of an article. Advanced technique, you see, and not for entry-level students of the craft. Having been in this racket for 40 years, I can make some claim to knowing what I’m doing, and the fact that you’re still reading this post after that (deliberately) botched lead is testimony to this advanced skill. What made Hunter S. Thompson great, at least in the years before chronic substance abuse wrecked him, was that he knew how to grab the reader by the eyeballs and drag him along with vivid phrasing, the reader/victim always wondering, “What’s this crazy son of a bitch going to do next?” Among other things, he accused the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review of being afflicted with “brain syphilis,” and given that the CJR editor did not sue for libel, we can assume that Dr. Thompson’s diagnosis was correct.

So as I was arguing with Ehlinger about the merits of When Harry Met Sally, the analogy occurred to me that Ladd’s film school standards of assessing what constitutes a movie masterpiece is sort of like the CJR editor’s version of what constitutes “quality journalism.” The real test of a movie is whether audiences like it — never mind the artistic quibbles — and the test of journalism is whether people actually read it.

Getting the facts right kind of counts, too, but even a beginner knows that. Learning how to tell the story in such a way that people feel compelled to read all the way to the end? That’s the trick.

OK, there’s your daily quota of Important News, but you didn’t need me to tell you that story, did you? Social media and 24/7 cable news have changed the game in ways that could not have been imagined back in the day when most people got their news from the daily paper, or the 30-minute nightly broadcasts on ABC/NBC/CBS. Now any random son of a bitch with a WiFi hookup can be a “journalist,” which means that I have to find a way to do something different, something valuable, something that might inspire you to hit the tip jar for $16.04. And it so happens that getting a WiFi hookup is relevant to the real reason I wrote this post:

One afternoon in August 2011, I set up my laptop in a restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska, ready to write a column for The American Spectator. It was the week before the Iowa Straw Poll, and I’d spent the day following Herman Cain’s presidential campaign bus, ending the day with a rally at a park in Council Bluffs. My friend Dave Weigel was there, and when he said he was going to have dinner at a German restaurant in Omaha, just across the river, I sort of invited myself to join him.
When I set up my laptop, however, I kept having trouble getting a WiFi connection. After an hour of fruitless effort — and a couple of cold beers — I gave up, telling Dave that it was obvious that I’d fallen afoul of The Gods of Dateline Integrity. . . .

Read my latest Substack article, which among other things includes the explanation for why I’m so specific about that $16.04.



 

Return of the Pro Se Pipsqueak: Disney and Hulu Get Sued by Brett Kimberlin!

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In 1978, four teenagers who worked at a Burger Chef fast-food restaurant in the Indianapolis suburb of Speedway, Indiana, were kidnapped and murdered. The local police badly bungled the investigation, and no one was ever convicted for what was at the time a very notorious local crime. The popularity of “true crime” podcasts has renewed attention to this case, and last year a documentary film, The Speedway Murders, was released. It’s now streaming on Hulu and — because it mentions a certain convicted bomber — it has become the target of a lawsuit.

[ snip ]

[ snip ]

In reporting that Brett Kimberlin’s lawsuit has been removed to federal court from its original Maryland venue, Eugene Volokh says, “The allegations are complex, and I don’t have the time to summarize them. I’m flagging the case chiefly because some of our longtime readers might be interested in Brett Kimberlin from his various appearances on the blog, chiefly stemming from brushes with early bloggers.”

Yes, we all remember that. One of the things you must remember is that I’ve been a journalist since 1986, and spent decades with a copy of the AP Stylebook and Libel Manual on my desk. The secret to avoiding libel is simple: (a) stick to the facts and (b) always attribute accusations. It is not me, the reporter, who is accusing the suspect of a crime; rather, I am merely reporting what “police say” the suspect has done.

“Sue Me Again, You Evil Liar” was the headline on my post reporting how Brett Kimberlin’s defamation lawsuit against me, Aaron Walker, John Hoge and Ali Akbar was laughed out of court by a Maryland judge in 2014. Among the sources I cited in my blogging about Kimberlin was Mark Singer’s definitive book Citizen K, as well as contemporary reporting by Joe Gelarden in the Indianapolis Star.

Brett Kimberlin’s convictions as the Speedway Bomber are a matter of public record. The pro se pipsqueak recently tried to have his convictions overturned, but lost at every step of the way, getting brutally curb-stomped by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which declared flatly, “Kimberlin’s arguments . . . are meritless.” Undeterred, Kimberlin appealed to the Supreme Court and, when they denied certiorari for the case Kimberlin v. United States in January 2023, I wrote:

Because you can’t argue pro se before the Supreme Court, the pipsqueak perjurer enlisted the legal assistance of well-connected Democrat lawyer Neal Katyal’s firm, but Kimberlin’s case was so preposterously weak that not even a big-dollar law firm could salvage it. So, if you’re keeping score at home, the final tally:

United States ………… 1
Brett Kimberlin …….. 0

Despite all that, however, I cannot presume to know whether the producers of The Speedway Murders might have somehow defamed Kimberlin. As I’ve explained, my reliance on such sources as Singer’s book and Gelarden’s reporting protected me against any finding of libel — it was not me making these accusations, see? I never claimed to have any more knowledge about what happened in Indiana circa 1978 than had previously been reported by others, or established as matters of fact in legal proceedings. Possibly, the makers of this documentary movie about the Burger Chef murders were not as careful about such things, and defeating Kimberlin’s litigation might not be such a slam-dunk for them as it was for me and my co-defendants. However . . .

If Kimberlin is contesting whether he was suspected of involvement in the murder of Julia Scyphers — making the filmmaker’s reference to that suspicion the basis of his defamation claim — he is likely to fail once again. Although the Scyphers murder has never been officially solved, certain facts about the case have been previously reported:

While no motive [for the 1978 bombings] was established at trial, prosecutors and police believe Kimberlin went on the bombing spree to deflect attention away from an ongoing investigation of the murder of 65-year-old Julia Scyphers. Scyphers “violently disapproved” of her daughter Sandra Barton’s relationship with Kimberlin as well as the “strange affection” Kimberlin paid to Barton’s pre-teen daughter, who had accompanied Kimberlin on several long unsupervised out-of-state trips. On July 29, 1978, Scyphers was shot to death just outside her home. Her husband Fred Scyphers, who briefly saw the shooter, identified William Bowman as the gunman. Bowman was a close associate of Kimberlin in the drug trade but Fred, the prosecution’s only witness, died shortly after the murder and Bowman was never charged. Scyphers’ murder still remains unsolved.

So said Wikipedia last time I checked.

Joe Gelarden referred to Barton’s daughter (Julia Scypher’s granddaughter) as “Debbie,” but when it came time for Singer to publish his 1996 book about Kimberlin, he used the pseudonym “Jessica.”

“For three consecutive summers, 1974 through 1976, they took vacations of a week or longer in Disney World, Mexico, and Hawaii. Sandi couldn’t get time off from work, so on these summer trips it was just the two of them — Brett and Jessica.
“Eyebrows levitated. A drug-dealing colleague had memories of conversations with Kimberlin that struck him as odd: ‘We’d see a girl, who was pubescent or prepubescent, and Brett would get this smile and say, “Hey, what do you think? Isn’t she great?” It made me very uncomfortable.’ Another recalled Kimberlin introducing Jessica as ‘my girlfriend,’ and if irony was intended, it was too subtle to register. To a coworker . . . Sandi confided that Kimberlin was ‘grooming Jessica to be his wife.’ To another, Sandi explained that although Kimberlin’s relationship with Jessica was chaste, he intended ‘to wait for her and would marry her.’”
— Mark Singer, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, Page 78

“Debbie”/“Jessica” was only 10 years old in 1974, and thus would have been 14 when her grandmother was murdered in 1978.

Obviously, suspicion is not synonymous with proof, but one does not commit libel merely by expressing suspicion, especially when that same suspicion was shared by law enforcement officials. Which is to say, if you add 1 + 1 and decide the answer is 2, your arithmetic is not a tort.

Just for the record, by the way, I am informed by people who have looked into the Burger Chef murders that Kimberlin almost certainly was not involved with that particular crime which was likely committed by someone personally connected to one of those teenage victims.

We shall see what becomes of Kimberlin’s latest lawsuit, but I wish the attorneys for the defendants in the Kimberlin v. Hulu case would get in touch with me. I could offer them some excellent advice — for a price.



 

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The Star Treatment

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Arrival of the international celebrities.

My wife and our youngest daughter, Reagan, returned from Argentina last night. Reagan said that after the plane landed, she removed her sweater and fixed her hair because she knew — from previous experience — that as soon as they emerged from the gate at baggage claim I would be snapping photos. “Paparazzi Dad” is nothing if not predictable.

This goes back to a Basic Journalism Trick that I learned during the earliest years of my newspaper career, working for small-town weeklies: Treat the people you cover as if they were famous celebrities. During four years as sports editor for the Calhoun (Ga.) Times, I elevated this technique to an art form. So far as our readers were aware, Timmy Starr was the greatest basketball player since Michael Jordan. You’ve never heard of Timmy Starr, of course, but when he was playing for the Bulldogs of Fairmount High School, he was a local sensation in Gordon County, and the coverage I provided his exploits was as effusive as Tiger Beat covering a Bay City Rollers concert tour. (Although you’d have to be old enough to qualify for Social Security to get that reference.)

My inspiration for that totally non-objective approach to journalism was, of course, Hunter S. Thompson’s pro wrestling hype of “Kazika the Mad Jap” during his early career as a local sports writer in Florida.

When you’re doing entry-level work in the newspaper business, you need to play some kind of mind games with yourself to maintain your morale, to convince yourself that the work you’re doing makes a difference, somehow, to somebody. You’re getting paid to do this job and, even if the subjects of your coverage are obscure and of interest only to a handful of locals, those people are your readers — the customers who are ultimately paying your bills — and you have to find a way of motivating yourself to provide excellence. If you can’t do that, you’re never going to get ahead in the news business and, having started my career on the very bottom rung of the industry, I was fiercely determined to get ahead.

Having developed this strategy at the outset of my career, and having proved its value through experience, I never forgot it. When you get to the point where you’re part of the journalistic scrum covering a major national story — whether that involves a sprawling presidential campaign or a syndicated documentary detailing how the best online poker platforms pioneered secure international payment networks — you must find some way to set yourself apart from the mob. Instead of letting other people decide what’s important, learn to rely on your own judgment, follow your own lead. You decide what angle to cover, and then cover the hell out of it.

So the Big Story last night was the wife and daughter of Influential Journalist Robert Stacy McCain returning from their Triumphant Tour of Argentina, and I got the world-exclusive scoop on that story.

Today’s Big Story? The Influential Journalist is taking his beautiful wife and lovely daughter out to dinner and — EXCLUSIVE BREAKING NEWS! — the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

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John Hoge, R.I.P.

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“The Other Podcast” is on hiatus, and NASA’s space robot program has suffered a major setback, as my podcast co-host John Hoge died Friday morning. Our friend Aaron Walker relayed the news:

I want to take a moment to announce that my best friend, John Hoge (@wjjhoge) has passed on. His son, William Hoge IV, called me this morning to share the terrible news. Earlier today, he was driving as normal when he had a heart attack. What little chance he had of surviving was foreclosed when he struck the side railing on the road. I am told that no other persons were hurt in that accident. I have no doubt that John would be glad to hear that no one else was harmed. A few years ago, his beloved wife, Connie Hoge had also passed on. I don’t think he ever fully got over losing her and I think everyone who knows him would be comforted by the thought that they are together again in heaven. Maybe doing some slow dancing. Maybe just enjoying each other’s company. Will is still working through the details, such as when he will be memorialized. I am sure Will would appreciate any thoughts and prayers for John and everyone who cared for him. And I am sure John would want well-wishers to donate to Connie’s Fund . . . (But you might also save your money possibly to help Will with final expenses.) I know many people online and offline will be mourning him. . . . We lost a good one today, folks.

As longtime readers will know, I first met John because of the Brett Kimberlin saga. In May 2012, when Kimberlin was trying to get Aaron Walker jailed, John immediately rallied to the cause on Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day, and was able to attend several court proceedings in the Kimberlin v. Walker affair to act as a reporter (he got his start in journalism as a radio broadcaster in Nashville in the 1960s). Eventually, the Kimberlin controversy culminated in Hoge, Walker, Ali (Akbar) Alexander and myself being co-defendants in a lawsuit (see “Sue Me Again, You Evil Liar,” August 13, 2014). Although he was an engineer by profession, John was the son of a lawyer, and proved to be quite an industrious pro se litigant, taking the legal offensive against Kimberlin on occasion, while monitoring the proceedings of Kimberlin’s various doomed efforts to appeal his original criminal convictions.

Polymath would be the best one-word description of Hoge’s tremendously versatile intelligence. The scion of a prosperous Tennessee family, John was a proud Vanderbilt University alumnus, and served as an officer in Army intelligence during the Vietnam War. He worked as a recording engineer in Nashville, then was a design engineer for sound equipment companies before landing (pardon the pun) in the aerospace industry, which brought him to Goddard Space Flight Center. When people asked him what he did, he’d give some kind of dry description, but after I understood his most recent endeavor, I told him his answers weren’t cool enough: “No, you design space robots for NASA.” Literally true, and much cooler sounding than “engineering contractor.”

As Aaron remarked, John was devoted to his late wife Connie, and since her death, he had a habit of beginning his anecdotes by saying, “When Connie and I . . .” For example, anytime there was news from California to discuss on the podcast, we’d hear a story about “when Connie and I” lived in California. Did I mention he was a leader in his church? His ancestors included prominent clergyman, among them a Presbyterian pastor named William J. Hoge. John led congregational “shaped note” singing at Frederick Church of Christ. He was a gentleman and a scholar, who was always well-dressed, well-mannered and well-spoken. His engineering skills made him indispensable at NASA, which was why he continued working into his 70s — younger engineers simply couldn’t do what the old guy did, having learned his trade in the slide-rule era.

John loved word-play and puns, and his last blog post was part of his long-running riff on Pinky and the Brain: “Are You Pondering What I’m Pondering? I think so, Brain … but if we switched to Danish, today would be a day ending in –g.” A typical droll Hoge-ism there.

In my first phone conversation with his son Will after John’s death, Will’s immediate thought was to find some way to get the podcast done at its usual time, but I told him to forget about that for now, as I’m sure he’ll have much work to do in making funeral arrangements.

Will should be your in prayers, and as for what else you can do to help, I’m sure contributions to Hoge via Pay Pal would be best.

Can You Guess Who Won the Court Case of Brett Kimberlin v. United States?

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Hint: Not Brett Kimberlin.

My podcast partner John Hoge has followed the long trail of this court proceeding, whereby the diminutive bomber endeavored to have his felony convictions voided because . . . Well, reasons!

Last year, the World’s Worst Pro Se Litigant™ got curb-stomped by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Because you can’t argue pro se before the Supreme Court, the pipsqueak perjurer enlisted the legal assistance of well-connected Democrat lawyer Neal Katyal’s firm, but Kimberlin’s case was so preposterously weak that not even a big-dollar law firm could salvage it. So, if you’re keeping score at home, the final tally:

United States ………… 1
Brett Kimberlin …….. 0

The new year is off to a propitious start, I’d say. By the way, today is the 11th anniversary of the incident at the Montgomery County Courthouse that led to Kimberlin filing a peace order against Aaron Walker, and subsequently getting Walker arrested, which was the proximate cause of the Brett Kimberlin story becoming nationwide news.

PREVIOUSLY:



 

‘Speedway Bomber’ Update: Brett Kimberlin Is Still Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

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John Hoge was the first to notice that the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals had denied Brett Kimberlin’s attempt to overturn his 1981 convictions in the Speedway bombing case. I didn’t react immediately because, of course, there was no valid reason to overturn his convictions and anyone familiar with Kimberlin’s track record as a pro se litigant knew he was going to lose. And so I didn’t mention this latest in the long string of defeats for Wile E. Coyote and the Acme School of Law. In November 2020, the District Court dismissed his case with brutal sarcasm:

Kimberlin has received an abundance of process. He had three trials, and at least four direct appeals, five collateral attacks, and four habeas petitions. … Put differently, “Kimberlin is no stranger to appellate proceedings.” United States v. Kimberlin, 898 F.2d 1262, 1264 (&th Cir. 1990) (Kimberlin VII). As of 1990, he had “averaged two appeals per year in [the Seventh Circuit] over the last decade.” Id.
Now he is back. Decades after his convictions, Kimberlin returns for another inevitable round of litigation. Dispersed over at least 10 filings, he launches a fusillade of claims — complete with typical conspiratorial bent — that range from merely incorrect to actually misleading. He does so under the writ of coram nobis — “[the] criminal-law equivalent” of a “Hail Mary pass.” United States v George, 676 F.3d 249, 251 (1st Cir. 2012). None of his passes finds a target.

The clown show of his appeal got similarly rebuffed by the appeals judges, who flatly state that “Kimberlin’s arguments . . . are meritless.”

Hat-tip to Instapundit for mentioning my own personal connection to Kimberlin, who sued me and a bunch of other people and — you guessed it — lost. Because that’s what losers do. They lose.




 

Ah, the Glamorous Life of a ‘Writer’!

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Roger Simon on “self-quarantining” as a novelist:

I know — it’s hard to look at the bright side of a pandemic. But take it from someone who has self-quarantined for the better part of fifty years, it’s not always so bad.
That’s what professional writers do, sit alone in a room and work (or try to) for hours on end.
I didn’t realize at roughly age fifteen when I fell in love with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler that the writer’s life was one of loneliness. I thought it was about attracting Bennington undergrads at cocktail parties by bragging about your (unfinished) novel when you weren’t dreaming up your Oscar speech.
I learned quickly.

I never dreamed of being a “professional writer.” My career plan as a teenager was to become a rock-and-roll star, making multi-platinum records, traveling the world, having sex with beautiful groupies. Bennington undergrads? Wow, Roger, talk about aiming low. Anyway, for a few years, I lived a low-budget version of the rock-and-roll dream until, at age 26, I got a job at a weekly newspaper in Austell, Georgia.

Being a local newspaper reporter isn’t as lonely as writing novels. You work in an office with other people, you leave the office to interview sources and cover events, and then return to the office to try to file some kind of coherent account before deadline. It was actually kind of fun, especially when I covered sports. After a year or so working in the suburbs of Atlanta, I became sports editor of the Calhoun Times, where in addition to writing, I took along my 35mm camera and got photos as well. In a small town, a local sports editor quickly becomes friendly with all the high-school coaches, and the players and their parents, too. How I loved the “hospitality room” at the annual Calhoun High School basketball tournament! There was a sort of potluck buffet provided by the Booster Club, so for three days in December, I ate for free.

Oh, sweet delicious memories . . .

Is there any gig in journalism as sweet as a small-town sports editor? I realized rather quickly that the secret was to write up each game as if it were crucial, and to hype up the players as if they were celebrities. The top scorer for a high-school basketball team is, in his own mind (and the minds of his parents and peers), a future NBA All-Star, so when Timmy Starr scored 23 points to lead Fairmount High to victory over Banks County, I’d feature a big photo of Timmy with a big headline and a story that conveyed the excitement felt by the most enthusiastic Fairmount fan. Then there was Shea Thurman, the girls’ track phenom at Gordon Central. When she captured four medals at the state track meet, I wrote it up as if she had just returned in triumph from the Olympics.

Here I’ll quote Hunter S. Thompson:

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.

Alas, there was no professional wrestling in Gordon County, Georgia, but there was a motocross track, and rec-league softball in the summer, and dear God help me, bowling leagues. The secretaries of the leagues would bring their weekly results to the newspaper office, and my job included typing all those results into the system.

Talk about your life of loneliness! You have no idea how tedious it is to be what is referred to in the sports-journalism racket as an “agate maggot.” The box scores, league standings and schedules which fill up one page of your daily newspaper sports section are in what used to be called “agate” type. Somebody has to compile all that agate, and on a large newspaper, this task is assigned to the lowest man on the staff totem pole. At a local weekly paper — do such things still exist? — the sports editor is a one-man staff, and so my job description included typing in bowling league results every week. You could not avoid this task, which required diligence and attention to detail because any error or omission in the printed results would summon the wrath of the bowling-league secretaries, who read every week’s paper with a hawk-eye scrutiny.

Years of typing in bowling league results are like the scars of a combat veteran. Having done my service as an “agate maggot,” I have a lofty contempt for these kids who think their degrees from some elite journalism school entitle them to be political pundits at age 23.

As Professor Reynolds says, Twitter is a “virus of the mind” — any arrogant punk can offer his “hot take” on national issues and attract a following by substituting cleverness for genuine knowledge. You never have to leave the basement, just bleat your partisan snark into the online echo-chamber 280 characters at a time, without doing any work at all. Sorry to sound like a grumpy analog-era fossil, but what these Twitter pundits need is the humiliating experience of being assigned to do some of the obscure drudgery of journalism, reporting on stuff that only the locals care about, or maybe typing in bowling-league results.

These punks have not paid their dues, you see, which is why so much of what they spew out on Twitter is full of errors and spin. They imagine themselves to be “experts” on whatever the story of the day is, so the same Twitter “hot take” crowd who were posing as experts on Ukraine policy a few weeks ago are now experts on epidemiology, and as long as they keep getting a certain number of likes and retweets, their phony expertise is as influential as any other Twitter pundit’s.

Ultimately, all these punks are angling for a cable-TV news gig. They picture themselves on the set of Morning Joe, or being interviewed on CNN by Don Lemon, and this dream of pundit glory signifies to them what “Bennington undergrads” once signified to a teenage Roger Simon, or what the rock-and-roll lifestyle once signified to me. So the Twitter “hot take” is never just 280 characters, but rather an audition for an MSNBC job, and should be discounted accordingly.

Myself, I never harbored such ambitions. I’m just a guy who writes words for a living, and over the years I have learned that the ambition of political influence is fool’s gold. What did Max Boot obtain by his “influence”? A share of the blame for the Iraq War debacle, and the eternal scorn of conservatives once he turned against his former friends.

So I’m never going to change the world, I’m never going to be sitting on the “curvy couch” at Fox & Friends, and I can’t do anything to halt the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. All I can do is to remind you that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Thanks for your support. It’s better than typing bowling-league results.