Where’s Hunter S. Thompson When You Need Him?
Who are the great journalists of today and yesterday? This question came to me lately for several reasons. I happened to watch Martin Eden yesterday, a wonderful Italian adaptation of the Jack London novel – until the last reel, when the film goes giddily off the rails. London’s conception of a great writer – a protean figure who combined elements of a Marxist working-class hero with Nietzsche’s Super Man – was wacky and uniquely his own. But it got me thinking – what real-life scribblers have exposed the hidden mechanisms of power, have burrowed deeply inside politics and the corporate economy and explained society to itself?
My list is heavily American – not just because I’m an American provincial, but because my kind of investigative journalism seems uniquely American. It’s also weighted with white men, because the Fourth Estate has been heavily dominated by this breed. And it mainly features alternative or independent writers (or news photographers) – because let’s face it, the stars of the mainstream press are lap poodles who seldom bite the hands that feed them.
Here’s my list of great journalists, daring seekers of the truth who put their mission ahead of career. Of course, there are many such reporters, many of them unsung. But these journalists aimed for big game, often the biggest. I’ve even had the honor of working with or knowing some of them. All made a deep impression on me.
Hunter S. Thompson. A surprise number-one pick, but as author Peter Richardson convincingly argues in a forthcoming book about the creator of gonzo journalism (Savage Journey), no journalist of his day wrote as passionately and truthfully about the deep evil of the Nixon presidency.
Just read these hot trumpet riffs about Nixon that Thompson blasted out. It will make you lament the fact we had no one like him to fully capture the warped malignancy of the Trump reign. (Matt Taibbi is a talented successor, but can’t hit Thompson’s crazy-true high notes.)
“It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise… He speaks to the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unrecognizable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close…
“Richard Nixon represents the dark side of the American Dream. Richard Nixon stands for everything that I would not want to happen to myself, or be, or be around. He stands for everything I not only have contempt for but dislike and think should be stomped out. Greed, treachery, stupidity, cupidity, positive power of lying, total contempt for any sort of human, constructive political instinct… Nixon represents everything that’s wrong with this country. Down the line.”
This, my friends, is the flame-thrower journalism we need today.
Here is the rest of my admittedly impressionistic list (in no particular order). Feel free to post your own intrepid truth-tellers.
I.F. Stone
Mark Dowie
Susan Meiselas
James Ridgeway
Ruben Salazar
Warren Hinckle
Robert Scheer
Orianna Fallaci
Glenn Greenwald
Robert Parry
Murray Waas
Why no Woodward and Bernstein? Because, like a lot of establishment investigative reporters, their big Watergate stories were handed to them by an aggrieved wing of the Nixon government. Throughout his subsequent career, Woodward continued to be used as a channel by factions of Washington power. His reporting must be viewed through this lens. The same goes for Seymour Hersh, who began his career with the stunning expose of the My Lai massacre, but has been used too often by his deep state sources to settle scores (as with his shameful CIA-influenced book on President Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot).
Give me fearless independent journalists who are not simply captives of their Beltway sources.
Hunter S. Thompson