White House party crashers

The addition of reporters from such ideologically driven news sites as Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo to the White House press pool has traditional media members concerned.

Peter Baker of the New York Times, for one, worries about relying on pool feeds from journalists who work for organizations that not only eschew impartiality, but scorn the idea that reporters can be unbiased.

Baker's point is well taken. Although reporters from HuffPo and TPM should be part of the White House press corps, it's a bit tricky to rely on them for pool feeds. But let's turn Baker's assumption of bias on its head: Should the New York Times worry that HuffPo and TPM will adulterate the news coverage of other White House watchers with their partisan bias? Or should HuffPo and TPM worry that once they join the game they'll find themselves adopting the traditional rules and standards to survive?

Think back to the days of Hunter S. Thompson and "The Boys on the Bus." We had hard-charging nontraditional reporters with stronger personalities and greater talents, and they pushed changes in the way DC was covered. But the more conservative, middle-line survived. (Indeed, the biggest change seems to be the boom in bad television journalism.) While the New Journalists have their heirs, the standards and traditions survived and, in some ways, became even more rigid.

Flashback to '97

In 1997, freelancer Matthew Hahn interviewed Hunter S. Thompson at Owl Farm and asked him how the Internet would affect journalism. How does the answer hold up 12 years later?

Here's the exchange:

MH: The Internet has been touted as a new mode of journalism -- some even go so far as to say it might democratize journalism. Do you see a future for the Internet as a journalistic medium?

HST: Well, I don't know. There is a line somewhere between democratizing journalism and every man a journalist. You can't really believe what you read in the papers anyway, but there is at least some spectrum of reliability. Maybe it's becoming like the TV talk shows or the tabloids where anything's acceptable as long as it's interesting.

I believe that the major operating ethic in American society right now, the most universal want and need is to be on TV. I've been on TV. I could be on TV all the time if I wanted to. But most people will never get on TV. It has to be a real breakthrough for them. And trouble is, people will do almost anything to get on it. You know, confess to crimes they haven't committed. You don't exist unless you're on TV. Yeah, it's a validation process. Faulkner said that American troops wrote "Kilroy was here" on the walls of Europe in World War II in order to prove that somebody had been there -- "I was here" -- and that the whole history of man is just an effort by people, writers, to just write your name on the great wall.

You can get on [the Internet] and all of a sudden you can write a story about me, or you can put it on top of my name. You can have your picture on there too. I don't know the percentage of the Internet that's valid, do you? Jesus, it's scary. I don't surf the Internet. I did for a while. I thought I'd have a little fun and learn something. I have an e-mail address. No one knows it. But I wouldn't check it anyway, because it's just too fucking much. You know, it's the volume. The Internet is probably the first wave of people who have figured out a different way to catch up with TV -- if you can't be on TV, well at least you can reach 45 million people [on the Internet].

(found via Marc Cooper)

Fear and Loathing in Whittier, CA

I'd thought about mentioning the link between the death of Ruben Salazar and the birth of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but Crime Scene blogger Frank Girardot blog beat me to it.

Still, it's good to remember that the spark that fueled the brilliance of Fear and Loathing was not some vague mourning over the loss of 60's idealism, but real outrage over the brutal realities of racism and social upheaval in a not so distant Los Angeles.

It was 1971, and Hunter S. Thompson had come here to write about the Chicano movement and an anti-war protest that ended with a sheriff's deputy firing a tear gas canister through the front door of the Silver Dollar Cafe in Whittier, striking and killing journalist Ruben Salazar.

Thompson's take on Salazar's death became Strange Rumblings in Aztlan, published in Rolling Stone magazine in April, 1971. While researching the article that same year, Thompson and Chicano attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta (a key source for Thompson) took their first trip to Las Vegas. That was the start of Fear and Loathing, which he began writing while finishing the Salazar piece at a Holiday Inn in Arcadia.

Almost 40 years have passed. I imagine it would be hard for anyone walking the streets of Whittier today to understand what was happening then. Maybe it would be a good time to pull the thread of history and tell the story of what has changed and what has stayed the same.