Real Journalists

Real journalists, old journalists, if you will--the kind of guys and gals who work a beat, develop sources, learn their subjects' businesses, bend over backwards to be fair and accurate are--to a disproportionate degree--people of high integrity. Drunks, often, but very honest.

There are thousands of these folks at work at big and little newspapers and wire services and even a few broadcast outlets every day, doing their jobs, making sure the mayor isn't giving all the development contracts to his friends, the local utility isn't gouging, and the local cops aren't beating up every vagrant they arrest. They are, in my experience, the fairest human beings I have ever met and they strive for a level of objectivity that is rare. It is also a fundamental part of journalism training, or at least it was, when I was a pup. Like everyone else they have personal prejudices and dislikes but real journalists place a high premium on being above personal prejudice.

Those people on CNN and NBC and CBS are not journalists and what they do is not journalism. The good hair people are news readers. The bad hair people are aspiring news readers. Brokow, Rather, Jennings are highly paid news readers. They are very smart people and very well-informed and glib but they are not reporters. George Will or Maureen Dowd or William Safire are no longer journalists. They may have been at some time but most columnists are paid to write their "opinions" which are entertaining, perhaps, but you are expected to agree or disagree with them. Their opinion may be better written than yours but yours is just as valid. A handful of columnists do report and do their own legwork: Bob Herbert, for example and Thomas Friedman--but most do not.

Now, there is another category of newsling--the talking head "expert" who probably has no more real knowledge of what's actually happening than the rest of us, but is willing to make a fool of him or herself in public anyway. These people are definitely not journalists and what they say is definitely not news.

Nowadays it is easy to mistake up the legitimate newsgathers and reporters with the bubblegum tv folks. They ain't the same but it's up to us to make the distinction.

The Senator

The first time I saw Robert Byrd was around 1955 at the Gwinn Family Reunion, which was held in those days in a rolling green pasture in Lockbridge, a rural community in a poor—but heartbreakingly beautiful—corner of southern West Virginia. He was 37-years-old and already a U.S. Senator. I was 12 and lived a couple of miles down the road.

There wasn’t a whole lot going on in Summers County in those days—still isn’t--so the Gwinn Reunion, which was held on the first Sunday in July, was a big attraction. You didn’t actually have to be related to the Gwinns to be welcome so nearly everybody in the county came to wander around the five-acre field and talk to their neighbors and eat and listen to live music, performed on a makeshift wooden bandstand.

It was a big enough crowd to attract an ambitious young politician so Bob Byrd came to mingle and make friends. My dad didn’t care much for the young Senator. For one thing, my family was one of the few Republican families in the county. For another, he didn’t like the fact that Byrd had once been associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Still, I thought the Senator seemed like a personable enough guy whose vivacity grew as the day wore on in direct proportion to his visits to a nearby shed for fortification with some locally made corn liquor (probably by my Uncle Jack, whose moonshine was considered top of the line).

This was the early days of rock n’ roll, remember, and times were hard for bluegrass musicians. For $250, you could get Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys to come and play at your high school gym, which they once did at mine. For their 1955 reunion, the Gwinns engaged the services of Mother Maybelle. These were especially tough times for the Carter Family. June had broken up with Carl Smith and hadn’t yet gotten involved with Johnny Cash so there she was, Maybelle Carter, a legend down on her luck entertaining a crowd of poor farmers and coal miners in a cow pasture in southern West Virginia. About 5 o’clock, Maybelle came on and sang those wonderful, mournful mountain songs—“Hello, Stranger,” “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Will the Circle be Unbroken,” “Wildwood Flower”—accompanying herself on an autoharp or guitar. For a finale, she was joined by Senator Byrd—extremely lively at this point in the day—who played “Soldier’s Joy” on his fiddle. Since that was the only song he could play pretty well, he played it a couple of time. Then, everybody went home.

I've thought of this picture postcard day from my childhood often over the last couple of years as he has emerged as the conscience of the Democratic Party, just about the only Senator to recognize how dangerous George Bush really is and the only one with the courage to say so. He was pratically alone in condemning the administration’s “reckless” rush to war, contantly castigating his fellow senators for their silence and warning of the disastrous damage that was being done to the country’s alliances around the world. A sample:

One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11. One can appreciate the frustration of having only a shadow to chase and an amorphous, fleeting enemy on which it is nearly impossible to exact retribution.

But to turn one's frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.

Republicans often disparage Byrd, call him “Senator Pork” for using his seniority and skill to steer federal money to West Virginia (I look at it as just trying to get back for his long-exploited people some of the plunder that Mr. Peabody’s coal trains have hauled away) but Robert Byrd has come a long way since the 1955 Gwinn Family Reunion. For a long time, he was the last man standing for the Constitution in Congress and a solitary voice of reason in a chorus of belligerent asskissers and spineless focus group junkies. Bob Byrd has come a long way from Lockbridge Road.

New York, New York

Thinking today about a memorable evening in November of 2001, a couple of months after 9/ll. The city still had a bit of the feel of what it must have been like in London during the blitz. People on the streets went about their business but they seemed to be sleepwalking. My wife, Suzanne, and I rarely do the nightlife thing but one chilly evening we forced ourselves to get dolled up and went over to an intimate little club called Feinstein’s at the Regency to see two graying and prosperous songwriters--Jimmy Webb and Paul Williams—perform some of the tunes that had made them—as Buck Owens once said of himself—“rich enough to set fire to a hound dog.”

Suzanne thinks Jimmy Webb, who wrote MacArthur Park, Wichita Lineman, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Didn’t We, Galveston, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Up, Up and Away, and many others, is God. I’m a closet Karen Carpenter freak and Paul Williams wrote most of those songs—We’ve Only Just Begun (the song most frequently performed at weddings), Rainy Days and Mondays, You and Me Against the World (Actually, that was Helen Reddy), Evergreen (actually, that was Barbra Streisand), the extraordinary Ordinary Fool. Both guys sing their own songs in much more interesting ways than the people who are most associated with them.

Paul Williams is a funny looking little guy (some of you will remember him from The Loved One or as Little Enos in the Smokey and Bandit pictures) with a funny little voice and a wicked sense of humor who grew up in trailer parks in Bennington, Nebraska and Lucasville, Ohio. This was one of the first public gigs he had done since he got sober twelve years ago. Jimmy Webb, an Oklahoma native who has lived in New York for 22 years is a tall good-looking guy who plays the piano well and is so self-effacing he would drive you home if you couldn’t get a cab after the show.

It was the first time I’ve ever been to a show where the performers thanked the audience for their “courage” in coming out and defined the evening as “an act of defiance.” Paul remarked that he hoped we “rebuild the World Trade Center, one story higher, with two 13th floors—fuck ‘em” and in a tribute to the city, Jimmy sang an old Frank Loesser song called “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, including mine, Suzanne’s, or Liza Minelli’s. Even Clive Davis, the formerly high flying music lover who once threw a demo tape at Carly Simon, got misted up.

The whole thing was one of those rare special evenings where an audience and performers connect to each other in ways that only happen in small clubs in New York and was one of a thousand little things that make you realize just how special and different and essential, this town really is. And, beneath the bluster and surface toughness, just how fragile and easily shattered.