Meet the Press

There is little as striking as the difference between the English attitude towards the press versus that of bestial Americans. In Britain, one need not be of manor born to share the general notion that Fleet Street is a but a pen for a swinish horde, a boulevard of drunken louts whose familiarity with the truth resembles Quentin Crisp's conversancy with heterosexual sex. The lot of them, when carousing in pubs, seem nothing so much as the worst fantasies of Hieronymous Bosch - a collection of imps, daemons, and golems engaged in all manner of horrific perfidy. Tomfools, all.

In America, by contrast, journalists are given awards.

It would be easy to fob off the dissimilarity to the limitless depths of American imbecility - it truly is a well that will never run dry - but that would be engaging in the lazy, sophomoric "analysis" so typical of the Fourth Estate, as well as the Irish. I believe there is a more trenchant explanation.

First, however, it would be wise to characterize more clearly what the English and Americans have in mind when they picture their Platonic ideal of a reporter. Jeffrey Bernard, the late writer of The Spectator's "Low Life" column, leaps to mind for most Britains. A dispomaniac whose drunkeness would have been considered heroic if in fact it weren't so completely obscene, Bernard spent his days writing in a stupor, constantly medicating himself with scotch after scotch. His vomit-flecked typewriter regularly churned reams of calumny, libel and sedition, to the point where had he been writing a century earlier under the aegis of my ancestors, his life would have been cut short at the gallow's pole.

Alas, in the "anything goes" era England has endured for the last forty years, Bernard enjoyed a certain celebrity, though it was of the daft uncle variety. In spite of the fact I give no credit to those who parade their tolerance as a towering achievement, like a righteous manifestation of the Manhattan Project, it reflects rather well on the English that they have never given Bernard nor any other prevaricating scribbler the sort of power which would result in execution if misused. In the influence rankings of bourgeois careers, journalist rates somewhere between assistant manager of a bowling alley and oaffish mop handler at an adult book store. They're hardly worth the trouble of firing, never mind punishments more capital.

American democracy, on the other hand, has its price, and a large percentage of the bill stems from the press's sway over the unwashed. Any sentient being can see the idea of American journalists setting the intellectual agenda for the American body politic bears an uncanny resemblance to a blind Princess Diana leading an Afghani orphan through a Russian minefield. Could anyone be less suited to the task of true journalism than an American journalist?

Picture the prototypical hack, if you dare. Regardless of what university attended, this pale wretch undoubtedly festooned his dorm with a poster of Che Guevera, an upside down photograph of the planet Earth, and - as a tip of the hat to his god above all gods, irony - a black and white portrait of a bloated Elvis Presley, preferably the one where he receives a commendation from Richard Nixon. This boy's university days were not spent seeking knowledge and females, as were mine, but ginning up incidents of "racism" at his notorious hotbed of bigotry.

Seven years later, degree in hand, it's off to the races, so to speak. With the appearance and bearing of a fetal pig, this mooncalf compensates for his inability to move events by tendentiously describing them to fit his jaundiced view of the same. In England, of course, it hardly matters because peers like myself are able to crush dissent, restore order, and round up the usual suspects before anything gets out of hand. But in America, a commoner is just as likely as not to vote in accordance with the foolish "advise" - ahem, news - he's read recently in his newspaper. Such are the wages of your democracy and your first amendment, my American friend.

It would be one thing if American journalists would clownishly misinterpret and misrepresent events and simply leave it at that. Yet they insist on lowering the bar even further by doing so in the most witless, dull, and stupefying manner imaginable. Have you ever read a piece of American journalism pillar to post? Never has imbecility and soporiferousness commingled so effortlessly; it's a singular experience to be falling asleep while reading, then being asked to turn the page again. It's a wonder there's not a Pulitzer Prize for the induction of narcolepsy.

At least Bernard, however unwittingly, could turn a phrase or two, and English journalists, while downing "me fifteenth pint," occasionally will utter something witty. Not so their American brethren. Their glum prose reflects suitably their general glumness, a condition they variegate with ample infusions of obnoxious self-righteousness and appropriate self-loathing. Like feminists, journalists know there is no joke better than one left unsaid, and the presence of mirth near them is like garlic to vampires. Oh by all means, let's let them call the shots!

I've lived stateside for almost fifteen years, and while I view American culture as a vulgar parade of savagery, saying the same of American journalism seems almost a compliment, however unintended. Perhaps there's a word - uninvented, perhaps undiscovered - that can encompass the wholesale idiocy, joylessness, and unsophistication of reportage, American-style. If the Lord, for whatever perverse reasons, made me a newspaper editor, I'd assign my staff to seek out this gargantuan bon mot, confident in the knowledge it would forever remain a mystery.

- Twimbley Duddleston IV