July 26, 2007
Dereliction of Duty
Dereliction of journalistic duty is at an all-time high, I would say, but here’s a perspective from a point in time not all that distant — the fall of 1960. The televised debates between presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy prompted one up-and-coming young journalist to send a letter to the editors of Time.
Hunter S. Thompson to Editor, Time. October 22, 1960.
. . .
Cub scouts could have asked more penetrating questions than the journalists have offered thus far, and no amount of grumbling about rules and regulations laid down by campaign managers and the television industry can obscure the fact that the representatives of the press have behaved like trained seals. The questions to the candidates have been, for the most part, nothing more than harmless cues, devoid of weight, meaning or perception. When you realize all the questions that could have been asked, all the fraud, quackery and evasion that might have been held up to merciless inspection before 17 million viewers, it raises the question that perhaps the press is no longer capable of fulfilling or even recognizing its responsibility to the nation it serves.
. . .
(Whether Thompson’s letter was published or rejected by Time is not noted by Douglas Brinkley, editor of The Proud Highway, the first volume of Thompson’s published correspondence.)
comments
thanks for this, Sheila.
My pleasure. No, make that ‘my painful pleasure’.
You know, it struck me this afternoon that my implied allusion to Rejected Letters to the Editor, the enterprise launched last year by Stuart Ewen et al., may have been oblique to the point of obscurity, at least for those not tempted to follow the link from rejected. Ewen’s undertaking certainly offers one counter to the regurgitated press releases that pass for journalism in our times. I strongly recommend a Rejected Letter featured in the current edition — a letter written by Matt Olive, an Iowa farmer, to Wallace’s Farmer magazine. It’s headed “America Is Like a Car Speeding Toward a Cliff”.