The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [80]
I liked your characterization of the press as the proper Victorian gent, that the press was reverent through all this.
I’ll never forget working on the Herald Tribune the afternoon of John Kennedy’s death. I was sent out along with a lot of other people to do man-on-the-street reactions. I started talking to some men who were just hanging out, who turned out to be Italian, and they already had it figured out that Kennedy had been killed by the Tongs, and then I realized that they were feeling hostile to the Chinese because the Chinese had begun to bust out of Chinatown and move into Little Italy. And the Chinese thought the mafia had done it, and the Ukrainians thought the Puerto Ricans had done it. And the Puerto Ricans thought the Jews had done it. Everybody had picked out a scapegoat. I came back to the Herald Tribune and I typed up my stuff and turned it in to the rewrite desk. Late in the day they assigned me to do the rewrite of the man-on-the-street story. So I looked through this pile of material, and mine was missing. I figured there was some kind of mistake. I had my notes, so I typed it back into the story. The next day I picked up the Herald Tribune and it was gone, all my material was gone. In fact there’s nothing in there except little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick’s. Then I realized that, without anybody establishing a policy, one and all had decided that this was the proper moral tone for the president’s assassination. It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman.
I say Victorian gentleman, because it’s he who was the constant hypocrite, who insisted on public manifestations of morality that he would never insist upon privately in his own life. And I think that one tends to do that on a newspaper. Less so in a magazine. A newspaper seems to have such an immediate tie to the public. Television doesn’t have it. Newspapers do. I’m not entirely sure why, but it makes newspapers fun to work for.
It also leads to these funny sorts of reactions. People never read editorials. All newspapers know this. And yet if you would publish a newspaper without editorials, it would be as if you had sold your soul to somebody. Everyone would ask, in effect, “Well, where are the editorials? They must have sold them. They’re taking something on the side.” And so newspapers are quite right to run editorials. It all has to do with this moral assumption.
Hell, to this day you can’t get anything in newspapers. I think of this as the period of incredible shrinking news. I’m really convinced that there’s less news covered in America now than at any time in this century. Television creates the impression that there’s all this news because the press has become very incestuous and writes stories about the press, with all these marvelous phony wars about television and what it does or doesn’t do. But television as a news medium has no reporting at all, really, except for some cosmetic reporting done by so-called Washington correspondents, who usually stand in front of some government building with a microphone covered in black sponge rubber, reading AP or UPI copy. In effect, every shred of news on television comes from either the wire services or from nonevents, to use Daniel Boorstin’s phrase—the press conference, the basketball game and so on. So you then have to ask, “What are the wire services giving us?” Well, the wire services are totally creatures of local newspapers. Those big wire services just cannibalize local newspapers. Suddenly you’re up against the fact that there’s no competition in most parts of the country at