just tell it like it is

In 1980 Nora Ephron wrote,
--------------- We are now in an era when the I-lost-my-laundry-while-covering-Yalta school of reporting has become an epidemic; when serious books that involve reporting often tend to be suffused with the author's admiration of his own investigative techniques; when the narcissism of the press almost outstrips the narcissism elsewhere in the country.  The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.  ------------------- [end excerpt]

I did not read this in 1980, I only just read it this year, & it reminded me of what I sort of felt, or sensed, at that time, that journalism had become a little bit weird -- it seemed like "everyone" wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, in that post-Watergate period of time.  You can't be someone else, and you can't manufacture news (or shouldn't) but -- I noticed that tendency....

You know -- Watergate
actually happened, and was
actually discovered,
slowly, gradually, by two Washington Post reporters
doing their normal, every-day
actual
work.

Then some writers afterwards, all over-excited, seemed to try to frame stories as if they were like Watergate and (not subtle) putting the word "gate" as a suffix after, like, everything.  I thought that was dopey and it turned me off to the idea of pursuing journalism at the time.

Around 1983 or -5 or something, watched a local person in reporting capacity getting aggressive and pushy and kind of loud, while asking a plain regular question to a -- local person, & I was surprised -- like, What are you Doing?  This is not a big "Crime" or something, this is routine, you could ask the question in a regular voice. 

The tendency to "dramatize" was perhaps beginning there and has sort of built to the seemingly baseless hysteria you sometimes witness, now, over -- like -- nothing.

Around the same time (mid-80s) my father, a life-long Democrat and middle-of-the-road liberal, got kind of upset because he thought Sam Donaldson was being too loud and aggressive and disrespectful to then-President Reagan, hollering questions as the president was heading for a plane. 

Few circumstances could be contrived that would have induced my father to ever vote for Ronald Reagan; however, he was "Our President," and my dad just thought that the television reporter's behavior and tactics were disrespectful and inappropriate.  And I kind of agreed.

It definitely seemed to be a trend.  The press sort of -- running amok.  (A-muck?)

-----------------------
Nora Ephron:
[1980]  ...There's nothing here [in her collected magazine articles] extraordinary or brilliant; I am a journeyman, and if these articles work, they work as examples of old-fashioned journalism.

[New York, 1970]  Some years ago, the man I am married to told me he had always had a mad desire to go to an orgy.  Why on earth, I asked.  Why not, he said.  Because, I replied, it would be just like the dances at the YMCA I went to in the seventh grade -- only instead of people walking past me and rejecting me, they would be stepping over my naked body and rejecting me.  The image made no impression at all on my husband.  But it has stayed with me -- albeit in another context.  Because working as a journalist is exactly like being the wallflower at the orgy....------------
[end excerpt]

{Wallflower at the Orgy, by Nora Ephron.
Copyright Oct. 1970, Viking;
July 1980, Bantam, div. Random House NY}

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