Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

  Here’s what I mean: People get nervous when they read stories in newspapers, because they always think they’re being lied to or manipulated (this goes back to the aforementioned “agenda” presumption). They always think they’re not getting the whole story. Actually, they’re getting more than the whole story; they’re getting the whole story, plus a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with anything.

  Remember our thirsty reporter who was waiting for the mayor to call him back? Well, let’s say he finally leaves the office and swings by Stop-N-Go (maybe he wants another Dr Pepper). While walking toward the counter with his beverage in hand, a crazed loner walks into the store and shoots the convenience store employee in the face, killing him instantly. The reporter watches this shooting happen. The crazed loner then begins screaming like a maniac, and two cops rush in and apprehend him. Now, remember—the reporter sees all of this firsthand. And as a consequence, he calls up his editor on a cell phone and volunteers to write a story about the event. And he probably writes something like this…

  RANDOM CITY, USA–The owner of a local Stop-N-Go was killed tonight in a brutal act of seemingly random violence. The alleged perpetrator was immediately taken into custody but firmly denies his involvement in the crime. “I never shot nobody,” said the alleged gunmen, who is also wanted for murder in seventeen other states.

  Actually, I’m sort of exaggerating: I’m sure a copy editor would undoubtedly feel obligated to remove the word brutal. But by and large, this would be seen as a reasonable accounting of the events. This is why all reporters eventually go insane: Even if you see a guy shoot someone—in fact, even if a guy shoots you in the face, and you watch the bullet come out of the chamber of the .38 he’s holding—the event needs to be described as an “alleged” crime, and that alleged criminal needs to allege that he had no part in anything that allegedly happened.

  Now, I realize this is essential to journalism, and I certainly don’t disagree with the principle behind that journalistic tradition. But these “essential” rules do create one rather embarrassing contradiction: Most serious news stories are peppered with information that is laughably false, and reporters are always fully aware of how false that information is. Newspapers are constantly quoting people who are openly lying, and almost every sound bite you hear in the broadcast media is partially false. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s not that the truth is being ignored; it’s just that the truth is inevitably combined with a bunch of crap that’s supposed to make news stories unbiased and credible, but really just makes them longer and less clear. The motivation for doing this is to foster objectivity, but it actually does the complete opposite. It makes finding an objective reality impossible, because you’re always getting facts plus requisite grains of “equalizing” fiction.

  In his book Explaining Hitler, author Ron Rosenbaum applauds a group he calls the “First Explainers,” a collection of 1920s journalists who worked at publications like the Munich Post and risked their lives in order to illustrate the impending danger of the coming führer. He paints these guys as heroes. However, I’m not sure if modern reporters would even be allowed to perform that kind of watchdog function if a new Hitler-esque character emerged in the twenty-first century; he would probably just be referred to as a “charismatic, neoconservative upstart.”

  As a result of this ham-fisted faux objectivity, skeptical news consumers often find themselves suspecting that a deeper truth can be found on the newspaper opinion pages, or through talk radio, or via egocentric iconoclasts like Bill O’Reilly or Michael Moore. The assumption is that—since these pundits openly admit their biases—you can trust their insights more. They display less guile, and you know where they’re coming from. But this is not true. You may find these people interesting and you may find them entertaining, but they offer nothing for anyone who doesn’t already agree with their espoused stance. George Will and Maureen Dowd are both more effective writers than I could ever hope to become, but all their political insights are unabashed propaganda, even when they happen to be right: They sometimes tell the truth, but they’re always subtracting facts. That’s what they get paid to do. They are paid to manipulate and simplify issues that are too complex for casual observers to understand independently. What makes them good columnists is their ability to present a version of the truth that somehow seems self-evident; they are urbane cult leaders. I will never understand people who complain that the media can’t be trusted, yet still inexplicably think they can learn something of value from Molly Ivins or Cal Thomas. Most of the time, political columnists and political commentators are trying to persuade you not to think critically about anything.

  Sports Reporters Hate Sports.

  Nobody realizes how much the people who write about sports despise the subject they write about. There is nothing they hate more. I know that seems paradoxical, and most of them would never admit it in public. But give them four drinks in a deserted tavern, and you will hear the truth: The people paid to inform you about the world of professional, collegiate, and high school athletics would love to see all sports—except for maybe the NCAA basketball tournament—eradicated from the planet.

  What’s depressing is that this was not always the case for these people. Back when today’s sportswriters were still enthusiastic young fellows playing outside at recess, they loved sports. It was the only thing they loved, usually. They were the kind of kids who would watch a baseball game on TV and keep the official book, and they worshiped Brent Musburger and they memorized statistics from the World Almanac and they cried when Dwight Clark caught a pass in the back of the end zone to beat the Dallas Cowboys in 1981. Very often, the only important connection they had with their fathers was watching Monday Night Football. All their adolescence, these guys dreamed of a life where they could think about sports for a living. So they all went to college and got journalism degrees, and they all got jobs as sportswriters. And five years later, they all find themselves watching games from the press box and secretly wishing they were holding sniper’s rifles.

  If you want to become jaded and bitter in the shortest period possible, become a sportswriter. You will spend your Friday nights trying to talk to high school kids who have nothing to say, and you will have to ask them questions until they give you a quote that proves it. You will spend your Saturday afternoons talking to college players who will earnestly discuss the importance of academics and school spirit two hours before they rape the first girl unluckiest enough to chug a GHB kamikaze. And if you become really good at your job, you will eventually get to live in hotels for weeks at a time, alongside millionaire pro athletes who—if not for their ability to perform one socially irrelevant act—would quite possibly kill you and steal your car. And you will still remember statistics from the World Almanac, but now those memories will make you mad.

  However, athletes aren’t the worst part about being a sportswriter; after a few months, the players merely become literary devices. The worst part about being a sportswriter is that no one will ever have a normal conversation with you for the rest of your life. Everyone you meet will either (a) want to talk about sports, or (b) assume you want to talk about sports. Strangers will feel qualified to walk up to you in a café and complain about Rasheed Wallace; upon your introduction, your girlfriend’s father will immediately ask you oddly specific questions about the New York Rangers. You may have insightful thoughts on the Middle East, but no one will care; they will be interested in your thoughts on middle relieving.

  Over time, you will see your life disappear into sweat and contract negotiations and descriptions of the wishbone offense. And you will hate it. And normal sports fans deserve to know this. They deserve to know that the people telling them about the Utah Jazz enjoy pro basketball about as much as Catholic priests enjoy watching The Thorn Birds. I honestly feel the best sports journalism of the last ten years has been Jim Rome’s work on his radio program The Jungle, since Rome seems to be the only man who aggressively accepts one very
important truth: The single-best part about loving sports is hating sports.

  Celebrity Journalism Is a New Kind of Meaninglessness.

  During the summer of 2001, you may recall a temporary hubbub about Tom Junod, a writer for Esquire magazine who did a profile on Michael Stipe of R.E.M. The controversy was that Junod admitted to fabricating much of the story, particularly details that made Stipe appear as an iconoclastic weirdo who stuck pennies on his eyes and consumed packets of sugar for no apparent reason.

  My initial reaction to Junod’s piece was that it was the wrong thing to do, and I still feel that way. Considering that almost nobody believes the media as it is, I can’t see how lying on purpose can possibly be to anyone’s benefit. But Junod claims he did this in order to make people reevaluate how the press covers celebrity, and that’s valid. It’s valid because conventional celebrity journalism is inevitably hounded by two problems: Either the subject is lying, or the writer is guessing. Junod just happened to embrace both of those obstacles simultaneously.

  The problem with interviewing famous people is that—much of the time—they don’t know anything. And I don’t mean they don’t know about religion or world affairs or physics; I mean they don’t know anything about what they’re supposedly being interviewed about. Quite often, you will see an actor discussing the character he’s playing in a certain film, and he’ll be explaining what kind of person this character is and what that character represents in a metaphoric sense (this happens all the time on Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio, America’s single most embarrassing TV program). This is crazy. The actor didn’t create that character; a screenwriter did. The actor didn’t decide what the character represents outside the narrative; that’s what the director tries to do. In a big-budget Hollywood movie, the actor has one responsibility: He needs to look visually compelling and recite the lines somebody else wrote for him. That’s the whole gig. But in order to promote movies, actors and actresses need to give interviews at press junkets, because nobody wants to read an interview with some nebbish screenwriter. As a consequence, celebrity journalism is usually just attractive people trying to make up answers to questions they barely understand.

  But those fabrications are only half the dilemma; part of the blame must fall on the reporter. It’s almost impossible for journalists to cover celebrities without collapsing into conjecture. Unless they work for a major magazine or a mammoth newspaper, reporters rarely spend much time with the celebrities they cover; very often, an artist will do eight twenty-minute phone interviews with eight different writers in the span of a single morning, and that’s all each writer has to work with. And since this artist probably said the exact same things in all eight interviews, all the writer can do is look at his ten rudimentary quotes and try to figure out how they can be used to prove that this person is somehow interesting.

  Great example: In 1998, I interviewed Dave Pirner of the band Soul Asylum. Relative to most alt rockers, he was a pretty good talker; we discussed his liberal political views and the state of the music industry and—very briefly—his defunct relationship with Winona Ryder. All in all, we were on the phone for maybe thirty-five minutes. I started writing my Pirner profile as soon as the call ended, and I found myself using his casual insights to paint an incredibly vivid portrait of both his personal life and the cultural significance of his band. I saw tragic parallels between his ill-fated romance with Ryder and the unavoidable illusion of a meteoric rise to fame, and the whole story turned out to be an amazingly well-constructed psychological profile of a rock star who needed to pass the apex of his fame before he could take the time to appreciate what he had lost. It was a very good story. But then something dawned on me: What the fuck do I know about David Pirner? I talked to this dude for thirty-five minutes, and we spent the first ten discussing the coolest bars in uptown Minneapolis. How could I possibly think I gained any meaningful understanding of this man’s existence through one completely innocuous phone conversation? I could have written the whole story without even talking to him, and it wouldn’t have been any more (or less) accurate.

  But you know what? My deadline for that Soul Asylum piece was 6:00 P.M. that same day, and I came to this realization at around 5:45. I could not change my life (or his) in fifteen minutes. I ran a spell check on the article and sent it to my editor, and then I went home. And everybody read my story, and everybody fucking loved it.

  That’s celebrity journalism.

  It Is Assumed You Can’t Read.

  If I have learned anything from working in journalism, it’s that people who read newspapers apparently can’t read newspapers. That’s all I’ve ever been told. Every discussion I’ve ever had with an editor has stressed that people despise the process of reading. What people want, I am told, are shorter stories that never jump to a different page (stories that jump to different pages are apparently too confusing for people to follow, although it certainly seems like people manage to comprehend books, which tend to be spread over many, many many pages). People also like graphics, especially pie graphs. Photographs are also profoundly important, even if it’s just a photograph of someone standing in front of the T.G.I. Friday’s they happen to manage. And don’t forget about sky boxes! People desperately need “sky boxes,” which are eye-catching charts that tell them about news stories hidden inside the same paper everyone assumes they don’t want to read. HOWEVER, the one thing nobody wants is sentences, and they certainly don’t want paragraphs. People despise paragraphs. Focus groups have proven this.

  Let me briefly describe what happened: At some unspecific point in history (during the height of the Vietnam War, probably), the television industry started kicking the newspaper industry’s ass, mostly because TV was able to deliver the bare bones of information at a much faster speed. It was like newspapers were a horse and buggy, and TV was a train. So how did newspaper magnates combat this dilemma? By trying to design a really, really fast horse.

  What newspapers tried to do was make reading feel like watching TV. Logically, they should have tried to do the opposite; they should have started writing longer, more complex stories, and they should have tried to deliver all the things the broadcast medium does not have the capacity to offer. But newspapers did the opposite. They tried to compete with the broadcast media by being flashier and less intellectual, which is why the newspaper industry is now controlled by page designers.

  Truthfully, I’m not even sure the average consumer knows that people called “page designers” even exist, but these individuals dictate everything you read (and—more to the point—everything you don’t). Intellectually, the newspaper industry is now controlled by guys like Mario Garcia, the consultant who redesigned The Wall Street Journal when it went to full color in April of 2002. In all likelihood, you have never heard the name Mario Garcia before today—yet he is the kind of man constructing your consciousness.

  Here’s how the newspaper process operates: Reporters write stories. Those stories are read by midlevel editors who tend to make minor content changes. The stories are then pushed to the “copy desk,” where copy editors check for grammar mishaps and factual errors (copy editors also write the headlines). Eventually the stories get to the “design desk,” where a page designer decides how to place this information on the tangible paper page—they decide how to incorporate the news alongside the photographs, graphics, sky boxes, and everything else that really doesn’t matter. Their goal is to make the page look pretty; they are akin to architects. Quite simply, they are trying to create a newspaper than can be appreciated by the illiterate.

  If you subscribe to a daily newspaper, you will notice that—once or twice a year—the paper will run a short story that mentions all the journalism awards that particular newspaper has won in some kind of quasi-notable journalism contest. Editors run these self-congratulatory stories because they think it makes the publication seem credible. However, winning awards in journalism is like winning awards at the Special Olympics; everyone is a winner. Every singl
e person I have ever worked with could technically be classified as “an award-winning journalist,” because everyone who enters journalism contests eventually wins something. However, these competitions are especially important to page designers. Since the only people who care about newspaper design are other newspaper designers, they are constantly giving awards to each other. And those meaningless plaques and certificates have become the driving force behind how the world consumes information. When you pick up the front page of any news publication, you are looking at someone’s attempt to win a design contest; everything that comprises that page—the words, the images, and even the white spaces between those words and images—are nothing more than props. In the eyes of the modern newspaper designer, all of those elements have equal value. This is not an exaggeration; stroll past any newspaper design desk and you will hear people talking about the “creative use of white space.” This means people are discussing ways to better utilize the parts of the paper that are blank (this includes the gaps between columns and the borders at the top and bottom of a page). Just think about that for a moment: People are literally discussing the creative significance of nothingness.5

  Now, page designers will insist that all they want to do is help writers and that their only true goal is to direct the eyes of readers to the stories they need to see the most. Sometimes I believe them; one of my best friends designs news pages for a living, and he might be the best journalist I’ve ever met. But good intentions can’t compete with bad policy, and that’s what the emphasis on newspaper design is. It’s now a journalistic philosophy, and it’s becoming the dominant one. What’s most troubling about the growing influence of newspaper designers is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: As newspapers and magazines become more obsessed with shorter, breezier stories and visual gimmickry, readers adopt that sensibility as normalcy. We are losing the ability to understand anything that’s even vaguely complex.