If you ever have been, are now, or are hoping to become a reporter in the future, this video ought to make your blood boil:
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It’s not just the cop’s rudeness and bullying, although that’s bad enough. Petty tyrants love to shove other people around, but when those hired to “protect and serve” start acting like they’re armed bureaucrats who don’t have to answer questions from the rabble, then we’re in trouble. Especially when it was not an emergency, and lives were not in danger. There had better be a pretty darn good reason from barring citizens, and their representatives in the media, from a public park, and this sure doesn’t seem like it.
What’s even more disheartening, though, is the way the reporters passively accept getting shoved around, and meekly shuffle backwards while complaining into their cell phones. And they weren’t sounding off like they had a pair, either.
What a pathetic display of cowardice, ineptitude and unprofessionalism. Believe it or not, there was a time when reporters were more than regime stenographers, when they laughed at a little obstruction like a guy with a badge and a gun, when they knew and asserted their rights as citizens and as practitioners of the only profession specifically protected by the Constitution. When this guy was the face of journalism:
Yeah, that’s Hemingway on the right, at the liberation of Paris.
Or this gal:
That’s Martha Gellhorn, the greatest female war correspondent of all time. At the D-Day landing, while her estranged husband, Hemingway, was stuck on a troop ship in the English Channel, she masqueraded as a nurse and stowed away on a hospital ship — and became the first reporter on Omaha Beach after it was secured. She wasn’t about to let some clown with stripes on his shoulders prevent her from doing her job.
And what was that job? Not to be popular, not to get face time on television, not to hold down a gig with one of the weekly news magazines, and also “contribute” as a talking head to a cable-news network, plus write books in which you deliberately withhold information, gleaned as a reporter, from the public until you can use it later in a tell-all book.
No, the job was get the story. By any means necessary.
So shame on the reporters for letting themselves be herded like sheep. Shame on them for not standing up for their rights, and getting arrested if necessary. And most of all, shame on them for not getting the story. If you’re wondering why journalism is currently in such low repute, you need look no further.
Meanwhile, have a look at this: It’s the first nine minutes of His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks’s remake of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur classic play and an earlier film. Sure, it’s sort of fiction, but Hecht and MacArthur were both Chicago newspapermen before they became screenwriters, and they got everything right about the men and women in the profession: the amoral bravery, the wit, the cunning and sheer joy in beating the system and getting at, however imperfectly, the truth.
At least enough of the truth to sell newspapers the next day.
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