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SLOW DAYS IN JOURNALISM  "Wow! Listen to this: Jerry Falwell told the graduating class of Arlington Bible College that he's pretty sure Hilary Clinton is a direct descendant of Mary Magdalene." |
A wacky quote goes far
on a news-free day
of TheColumnists.com
Back in the days when I was molding public opinion for the dailies, we Sacramento reporters would occasionally have a slow day. The governor would be on vacation or something and the legislature would be quiescent. That’s when a bunch of us would troop over to the state Department of Education building and interview Max Rafferty,* the state superintendent of public instruction.
Max would always see us, and he would always say something outrageous about, say, the teachers’ union, California’s schoolchildren in general, or higher education. It would give us a peg upon which to hang stories that sometimes made the front page, and would always get fairly prominent display. It was a little as if we were saying to our readers, “My gosh, get a load of THIS!”
Max loved it. We loved it. Win-win. (Full disclosure: I later served as press secretary to Wilson Riles, who had defeated Max to become state superintendent.)
A parallel case was the district attorney in one of California’s Sierra foothill counties who seriously tried to prosecute a newspaper publisher for criticizing a county judge. The DA said he had a perfect right to do that under California law. I remember driving up to his office, thinking “Boy, if this doesn’t make the ‘A’ wire, (The Associated Press national wire) I don’t know what will!”
And sure enough, when I interviewed him, the DA unloaded a stream of quotes that were unbelievable, talking about the necessity of upholding the dignity of the courts, the nonsensical qualities of the First Amendment, and so on. Unbelievable stuff.
(An idiot reporter from the Stockton Record, who was also interviewing the DA, felt it was his duty to tone down the nature of the DA’s remarks. He kept re-phrasing the DA’s comments and repeating them back to the man to make them seem more reasonable. He was trying to get the DA to wise up. I could have strangled him.)
It didn’t work, however. The DA stuck to his rhetorical guns. I drove back to the bureau saying, “Yippee!” I did get a national story out of it. No editor could pass up quotes like that.
Reporters have always delighted in the outlandish. It’s journalism. If people behave oddly, or if someone in any kind of position of prominence says something eccentric, reporters will of course run chortling to their keyboards. More than 80 years ago, H.L. Mencken had lots of fun reporting on the antics of those who attended revival meetings in the South.
So it’s a grand old tradition. The difference today, though, is that it seems to have developed into an embedded journalistic subspecialty. It could be a result of what everyone seems to regard as an increasingly divided nation, but statements such as the one from Jerry Falwell that gays and feminists were at least partly responsible for Sept. 11 seem to be popping up in the media more often than before. I don’t think the percentage of Falwells has increased in our society, but I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a Jerry Falwell editor or a Tom DeLay editor on some of our major dailies.
“Things are really slow today. Give Pat Robertson a call,” they might instruct their reporters.
The wonder of it all is it’s still win-win. Reporters get a heck of a quickie story, those in the blue coastal states and big cities can giggle to one another over the latest utterances of the Neanderthals, and those out in the conservative, rural parts of the Red States can say “Damn Right!” to one another.
It probably doesn’t make much difference in the stately course of empire, but it does give people a view of events that might be a little skewed. A fun-seeking reporter can find acres of diamonds out there even though most people in prominent places are not that over-the-top in their public utterances.
Just remember that the next time you read a particularly amazing statement from someone, it was probably a slow day in the news business.
*There was a terribly unkind joke about Max. When he was defeated for a third term, he moved from California to Alabama. Wiseacres said the IQ of both states went up by 50 percent.
©2005 by Charles M.
McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel.
The cartoon is from IMSI's Master/Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco
Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted on May 30, 2005.
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