Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

news stories unbiased and credible, but really just makes them longer and less clear. The motivation for doing this is to foster objectivity, but it actually does the complete opposite. It makes finding an objective reality impossible, because you’re always getting facts plus requisite grains of “equalizing” fiction.

In his book Explaining Hitler, author Ron Rosenbaum applauds a group he calls the “First Explainers,” a collection of 1920s journalists who worked at publications like the Munich Post and risked their lives in order to illustrate the impending danger of the coming fuhrer. He paints these guys as heroes. However, I’m not sure if modern reporters would even be allowed to perform that kind of watchdog function if a new Hitler-esque character emerged in the twenty-first century; he would probably just be referred to as a “charismatic, neoconservative upstart.”

As a result of this ham-fisted faux objectivity, skeptical news consumers often find themselves suspecting that a deeper truth can be found on the newspaper opinion pages, or through talk radio, or via egocentric iconoclasts like Bill O’Reilly or Michael Moore. The assumption is that—since these pundits openly admit their biases—you can trust their insights more. They display less guile, and you know where they’re coming from. But this is not true. You may find these people interesting and you may find them entertaining, but they offer nothing for anyone who doesn’t already agree with their espoused stance. George Will and Maureen Dowd are both more effective writers than I could ever hope to become, but all their political insights are unabashed propaganda, even when they happen to be right: They sometimes tell the truth, but they’re always subtracting facts. That’s what they get paid to do. They are paid to manipulate and simplify issues that are too complex for casual observers to understand independently. What makes them good columnists is their ability to present a version of the truth that somehow seems self-evident; they are urbane cult leaders. I will never understand people who complain that the media can’t be trusted, yet still inexplicably think they can learn something of value from Molly Ivins or Cal Thomas. Most of the time, political columnists and political commentators are trying to persuade you not to think critically about anything.

Sports Reporters Hate Sports.

Nobody realizes how much the people who write about sports despise the subject they write about. There is nothing they hate more. I know that seems paradoxical, and most of them would never admit it in public. But give them four drinks in a deserted tavern, and you will hear the truth: The people paid to inform you about the world of professional, collegiate, and high school athletics would love to see all sports—except for maybe the NCAA basketball tournament—eradicated from the planet.

What’s depressing is that this was not always the case for these people. Back when today’s sportswriters were still enthusiastic young fellows playing outside at recess, they loved sports. It was the only thing they loved, usually. They were the kind of kids who would watch a baseball game on TV and keep the official book, and they worshiped Brent Musburger and they memorized statistics from the World Almanac and they cried when Dwight Clark caught a pass in the back of the end zone to beat the Dallas Cowboys in 1981. Very often, the only important connection they had with their fathers was watching Monday Night Football. All their adolescence, these guys dreamed of a life where they could think about sports for a living. So they all went to college and got journalism degrees, and they all got jobs as sportswriters. And five years later, they all find themselves watching games from the press box and secretly wishing they were holding sniper’s rifles.

If you want to become jaded and bitter in the shortest period possible, become a sportswriter. You will spend your Friday nights trying to talk to high school kids who have nothing to say, and you will have to ask them questions until they give you a quote that proves it. You will spend your Saturday afternoons talking to college players who will earnestly discuss the importance of academics and school spirit two hours before they rape the first girl unluckiest enough to chug a GHB kamikaze. And if you become really good at your job, you will eventually get to live in hotels for weeks at a time, alongside millionaire pro athletes who—if not for their ability to perform one socially irrelevant act—would quite possibly kill you and steal your car. And you will still remember statistics from the World Almanac, but now those memories will make you mad.

However, athletes aren’t the worst part about being a sportswriter; after a few months, the players merely become literary devices. The worst part about being a sportswriter is that no one will ever have a normal conversation with you for the rest of your life. Everyone you meet will either (a) want to talk about sports, or (b) assume you want to talk about sports. Strangers will feel qualified to walk up to you in a cafe and complain about Rasheed Wallace; upon your introduction, your girlfriend’s father will immediately ask you oddly specific questions about the New York Rangers. You may have insightful thoughts on the Middle East, but no one will care; they will be interested in your thoughts on middle relieving.

Over time, you will see your life disappear into sweat and contract negotiations and descriptions of the wishbone offense. And you will hate it. And normal sports fans deserve to know this. They deserve to know that the people telling them about the Utah Jazz enjoy pro basketball about as much as Catholic priests enjoy watching The Thorn Birds. I honestly feel the best sports journalism of the last ten years has been Jim Rome’s work on his radio program The Jungle, since Rome seems to be the only man who aggressively accepts one very important truth: The single-best part about loving sports is hating sports.

Celebrity Journalism Is a New Kind of Meaninglessness.

During the summer of 2001, you may recall a temporary hubbub about Tom Junod, a writer for Esquire magazine who did a profile on Michael Stipe of R.E.M. The controversy was that Junod admitted to fabricating much of the story, particularly details that made Stipe appear as an iconoclastic weirdo who stuck pennies on his eyes and consumed packets of sugar for no apparent reason.

My initial reaction to Junod’s piece was that it was the wrong thing to do, and I still feel that way. Considering that almost nobody believes the media as it is, I can’t see how lying on purpose can possibly be to anyone’s benefit. But Junod claims he did this in order to make people reevaluate how the press covers celebrity, and that’s valid. It’s valid because conventional celebrity journalism is inevitably hounded by two problems: Either the subject is lying, or the writer is guessing. Junod just happened to embrace both of those obstacles simultaneously.

The problem with interviewing famous people is that—much of the time—they don’t know anything. And I don’t mean they don’t know about religion or world affairs or physics; I mean they don’t know anything about what they’re supposedly being interviewed about. Quite often, you will see an actor discussing the character he’s playing in a certain film, and he’ll be explaining what kind of person this character is and what that character represents in a metaphoric sense (this happens all the time on Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio, America’s single most embarrassing TV program). This is crazy. The actor didn’t create that character; a screenwriter did. The actor didn’t decide what the character represents outside the narrative; that’s what the director tries to do. In a big-budget Hollywood movie, the actor has one responsibility: He needs to look visually compelling and recite the lines somebody else wrote for him. That’s the whole gig. But in order to promote movies, actors and actresses need to give interviews at press junkets, because nobody wants to read an interview with some nebbish screenwriter. As a consequence, celebrity journalism is usually just attractive people trying to make up answers to questions they barely understand.

But those fabrications are only half the dilemma; part of the blame must fall on the reporter. It’s almost impossible for journalists to cover celebrities without collapsing into conjecture. Unless they work for a major magazine or a mammoth newspaper, reporters rarely spend much time with the celebrities they cover; very often, an artist will do eight twenty-minute phone interviews with eight different writers in the span of a single morning, and that’s all each writer has to work with. And since this artist probably said the exact same things in all eight interviews, all the writer can do is look at his ten rudimentary quotes and try to figure out how they can be used to prove that this person is somehow interesting.

Great example: In 1998, I interviewed Dave Pirner of the band Soul Asylum. Relative to most alt rockers, he was a pretty good talker; we discussed his liberal political views and the state of the music industry and—very briefly—his defunct relationship with Winona Ryder. All in all, we were on the phone for maybe thirty-five minutes. I started writing my Pirner profile as soon as the call ended, and I found myself using his casual insights to paint an incredibly vivid portrait of both his personal life and the cultural significance of his band. I saw tragic parallels between his ill-fated romance with Ryder and the unavoidable illusion of a meteoric rise to fame, and the whole story turned out to be an amazingly well-constructed psychological profile of a rock star who needed to pass the