Reporting the snooze: When did journalists become so boring?

Christopher Hitchens. Hunter S. Thompson. Georgie Anne Geyer. Say what you will about these legendary American
journalists
, but they were not boring.

Thompson, known for his drug use, became famous by reporting on the biker gang known as Hell’s Angels, who beat him up when his book was published. Hitchens was a boozer, atheist, iconoclast, and
war
correspondent with a cutting wit. Georgie Anne Geyer was a fearless foreign correspondent who interviewed
Fidel Castro
.

Their kind has since disappeared from our media landscape, to be replaced by the likes of narcoleptic Andrea Mitchell, dear-Lord-is-he-still-talking-about-nothing Joe Scarborough, and cipher Taylor Lorenz.

What happened? When did journalists become so boring?

“Never mistake motion for action,” Ernest Hemingway, another great, nonboring journalist, once said. On Twitter, on 24/7 cable TV, in the newspaper, and on websites, there is a lot of frantic motion but not much action.

In 2000, writing a new preface for a reissue of her autobiography, Georgie Anne Geyer said young people would ask her how she prepared for her interviews. “I have to tell them that the way you control your interviews (or any other part of your work) is to know more about the subject than the other person does,” she wrote. “This advice, as you can well imagine, is seldom greeted with deafening applause.” Indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find a reporter or pundit today able to demonstrate knowledge of anything but their own self-angst.

Yet somehow, these journalists have weaseled their way into positions of status. Their debutante is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, better known as Nerd Prom. Reading descriptions of the event, you’d think these journalists have to spend their days running from the paparazzi. Here’s Vanity Fair’s take: “Tamara Keith, who serves as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, acknowledges that most people tune in for the red-carpet celebrity spotting and the evening’s entertainment.

“On that front, I can report that comedian and Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. will be this year’s entertainer,” Keith added.

Roy Wood — an insipid choice for an indolent, well-behaved crowd. (The event is on April 29.)

The profile of Keith in Vanity Fair gives a clue as to why the Fourth Estate has become so dull. Keith became fascinated with NPR through its member station KCRW, which she’d listen to as she traveled to and from auditions as a child actor and model in California. As a teenager, she sent letters to NPR journalists such as Cokie Roberts and Liane Hansen. Then, she worked her way up through the system.

She’s never worked anywhere else, although she did spend some time in Middle America: “I’ve spent most of my career outside of the bubble, or at least outside of the Beltway, covering agriculture communities and environmental issues in the Central Valley. Sometimes I feel like it’s a disadvantage, because I’m not as fully immersed in the culture that is Washington, and sometimes I feel very lucky that I went on a date at Walmart when I was in high school.”

A date at Walmart? Where’s the gunfire, the wars, the sex, the DUIs? Where is the literature that ignited a passion in the heart to become a writer? Where are the stunning failures that formed a soul? (Keith’s bio does say she covered an earthquake in Haiti, so perhaps there is hope for her.)

Roger Daltrey, the singer for the Who, once said that when you hear his band, you know “it’s something with blood pumping through its veins.” Who in the media today has blood pumping through their veins? Chuck Todd? Hold a mirror under his nose — see if he’s breathing.

It’s not even a left-wing problem. Conservative journalists may be even more boring than the liberals. They get their jobs through family connections or the buddy system, sign up for a cushy gig — maybe as a movie critic! — and coast for a few decades. The one guy on the Right who captivates is Tucker Carlson, a brilliant and erudite wild card who is completely unpredictable. He was rewarded for his vitality this week by reportedly getting fired.

My father was a writer for National Geographic. His colleagues were impressive figures. They were journalists who had read a lot of books, had a few drinks, and been to a lot of places. There was Howard LaFay, a large, hilarious man with wavy black hair who wrote articles for the magazine about Leningrad, Trinidad, and Easter Island. He covered Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral and wrote a book about the Vikings. In World War II, he served for three years with the Marine Corps in the Pacific and was wounded on Okinawa, receiving the Purple Heart. After studying for two years at the Sorbonne, he was recalled to active duty and served as a captain during the Korean conflict.

There was also Thomas Abercrombie. In 1957, Abercrombie was the first civilian correspondent to reach the South Pole. In 1965, he discovered the 6,000-pound Wabar meteorite in the Arabian Desert. A few years earlier, in Cambodia, he outwitted an angry mob, eager to tear any American limb from limb, by convincing them he was French. He wrote about the year he spent traveling through 35 countries — from Morocco to China — in the footsteps of a 14th-century Arab explorer. For emergencies, he carried wafers of Swiss gold in his pack and an AK-47.

Finally, I can never forget Luis Marden, the real-life most interesting man in the world. Hired by National Geographic at age 21, he was a pioneer of underwater photography. He found the wreck of the Bounty and dove with Jacques Cousteau. Marden was friends with kings and spoke five languages. His house on the Potomac River was custom-built for him by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Roy Wood and Wolf Blitzer at the Nerd Prom would have put them to sleep.

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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of 
The Devil
s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi
. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.