“MOST JOURNALISTS are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places. The sane scene that is much of life, the great portion of the planet unmarked by madness does not lure them like riots and raids, crumbling countries, sinking ships, bankers banished to Rio and burning Buddhist nuns – gloom is their game, the spectacle their passion, normality their nemesis.”
Thus opens Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power, the story of the venerable institution that is The New York Times, published in 1969. Talese is no anti-press critic. He is a journalist himself, having worked for the Times itself.
The rest of Talese’s opener which tells much of what makes a journalist follows:
“Journalists travel in packs with transferable tension and they can only guess to what extent their presence in large numbers ignites an incident, turns people on. For press conferences and cameras and microphones have become such an integral part of the happening of our time that nobody today knows whether people make news or news makes people – General Ky in Vietnam, feeling no doubt more potent after his sixth magazine-cover story, challenges Red China; after police in New York raided the headquarters of young hoodlums, it was discovered that some gang leaders keep scrapbooks; in Baltimore, a day after the Huntly-Brinkley Report mentioned that the city had survived the summer without a race riot, there was a race riot. When the press is absent, politicians have been known to cancel their speeches, civil rights marchers to postpone their parades, alarmists to withhold their dire predictions. The troops at the Berlin Wall, largely ignored since Vietnam stole the headlines, coexist casually, watching the girls go by.
“News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well not have happened at all. Thus the journalist is the important ally of the ambitious, he is lamplighter for stars. He is invited to parties, is courted and complimented, has easy access to unlisted telephone numbers and so many levels of life. He may send to America a provocative story of poverty in Africa, of tribal threats and turmoil – and then he may go for a swim in the ambassador’s pool. A journalist will sometimes mistakenly assume that it is his charm, not his usefulness, that gains such privilege; but most journalists are realistic men not fooled by the game. They use as well as they are used. Still they are restless. Their work, instantly published, is almost as instantly forgotten, and they must endlessly search for something new, must stay alive with bylines and not be scooped, must nurture the insatiable appetites of newspapers and networks, the commercial cravings for new faces, fashions, fads, feuds; they must not worry when news seems to be happening because they are there, nor must they ponder the possibility that everything they have witnessed and written in their lifetime may someday occupy only a few lines in the plastic textbooks of the twenty-first century.
“And so each day, undaunted by history, plugged into the “instant,” journalist of every creed, quality, and quirk report the news of the world as they see it, hear it, believe it, understand it.”
(Reprinted from the first anniversary issue of The Angeles Sun, August 1989)
