BACK WHEN I WAS a pie-eyed college sprout–juggling a nerve-shattering regimen of 1 p.m. alarm clocks and game-show watching marathons–I elected to ignore the counsel of my pastor, the advice of my parents, and the ridicule of my peers. I decided to do something for me, and became a journalism major. Even in utero, most of us aspiring journalists had the nagging suspicion that learning how to write a snappy lede or compose car-accident stories in the inverted-pyramid style wasn’t worth two semesters of instruction, let alone, four years. Seeing our shambling professors, who had worked in some of the finest newsrooms in Gallup, New Mexico, we quickly suspected that we should have chosen a more respectable vocation–say, rodeo clown, or carnival ticket-taker. But we slogged through classes anyway. We were force-fed the collected wisdom of Ernie Pyle and Horace Greeley, as well as driblets from such contemporary paragons as Jessica Savitch and Geraldo. Since most of us were interested in little besides our sophomoric prose styles (we were, to be fair, sophomores) we naturally gravitated to Hunter Thompson, who spoke for us when he wrote, “Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a . . . false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector.” (Imagine what he could’ve done on “Reliable Sources”). Three weeks ago, this sense of self-loathing came back in a rush when I was dispatched to Boca Raton to cover the first anthrax outbreak. The site of the initial incidents was the tabloid media giant American Media Inc., which, about three ground zeroes ago, was still being billed as the new one. Upon arriving, I was just in time for the memorial service of Bob Stevens, the Sun photo re-toucher who had succumbed to inhalation anthrax. As I walked up to the church, looking mournful and inconspicuous with a micro-recorder stashed in my bag, a woman standing guard at the door halted me. “And you are?” she asked. I gave my name. “From?” she inquired. I answered honestly, hoping that she would mistake our publication’s name for that of a grocery store rag’s, even though our coverage of Tom and Nicole’s break-up has been rather thin. “Sorry,” she said, “no journalists allowed.” No journalists allowed? The memorial service was for a journalist, and was being attended by all of his friends who were journalists from the ranks of the Star, the National Enquirer, the Globe, et al. Three American Media-hired security guards then shuffled me off to a grassy knoll behind a police tape cordon, where all manner of non-tabloid journalists, from the New York Times to CBS radio, were told to cool their heels until the service was over. Needless to say, we did what journalists do best–whine like hungry children. Many of us thought this would be a cake assignment: Go down to Palm Beach, grab some brunch at Chuck & Harold’s, then cozy up to our tabloid brothers, who, being members of the fraternity, would open their veins and bleed perfectly-crafted paragraphs into our little notebooks. But at the American Media headquarters building, we’d gotten skunked all day long. As harried tabloid employees–men and women who are accustomed to hiding behind shrubbery in the service of their craft–left the security of their offices, we mainstream media types madly lunged at them, only to hear curt “no comments” and “maybe next times” as they squealed off in their Pathfinders. Whenever one of us had gotten even ten seconds of a tabloid reporter’s time, we’d compare notes afterwards like Marlin Perkins sidekicks trying to ear-tag a new species. “What’s that one’s name?” I asked. “His name is ‘no comment,'” a colleague replied. A National Enquirer reporter finally spelled things out: “We’re a pretty tight-lipped lot around here. Maybe it’s because of the confidentiality agreements we’ve signed.” As we stood outside the church, watching tabloid types pass (a disproportionate number of them Brits with thatchy white heads and happy-hour complexions), we were read the riot act by police–there at the behest of American Media Inc.–who told us we’d get no feeds, no pool reports, not even a chance to bum-rush memorial service attendees in the parking lot as they left the sanctuary. This seemed to give them pleasure. One officer, however, did say that he had tried to intervene on our behalf, making the case to an American Media executive that it seemed a tad hypocritical for the most invasive media organs in the country to now cite privacy concerns. “He told me it was for the sanctity of the family,” the cop explained. “I said, ‘What about Elvis’s family?'” “Now hang on,” said a British-accented gent, straggling in late to the service. “If you worked at the Sun Sentinel, would you want all these people at your employee’s memorial?” “If I worked at the Sun Sentinel,” replied one Palm Beach Post reporter, “I’d kill myself.” The mood was blackening, the hunters had become the hunted. As the car of American Media editorial director Steve Coz pulled up, we jumped like high-hurdlers over a drainage gulch to solicit yet another unhelpful quote: “The FBI and CDC have asked us to refrain from talking about specifics,” he said. About this time, I had my college flashback, thinking, “I sat through an entire two weeks of classes on conflict-of-interest disclosures for this?” Not only was I desperately trying to crash a memorial service being conducted by a swarm of human gadflies whose work is best appreciated when there’s a stack-up in the Safeway express lane, but I wasn’t even doing a good job of it. There is little doubt that if, say, Zsa Zsa Gabor were being memorialized in a closed service, the Enquirer would have had ten people in the church, and one of them would have been the minister. Now, three weeks later, American Media Inc.’s tabloids are back in fighting shape, chock-a-block with useful information: Gwyneth Paltrow, it seems, has been shopping for “sexy undies.” Stevie Wonder, alleges a lawsuit, has given his assistant herpes. Hillary Clinton has survived her own personal anthrax nightmare, as Tom Daschle, “the man she adores,” and who she “is always cozying up to,” has blessedly escaped unscathed. Which is more than you can say for dead hijacker Mohamed Atta, who, according to the Enquirer, was a “vicious phony” and a “mama’s boy” who led a “secret gay life” and believed that “Women are for procreation . . . men are for recreation!” Interestingly, the gag order imposed on Steve Coz and company has–wouldn’t you know it–somehow been generously lifted by the FBI just in time for the Star to land a “world exclusive” interview with Bob Stevens’s widow. But the Star’s exclusive isn’t so exclusive that their sister publication, the National Enquirer, didn’t also land an “exclusive” with Stevens’s wife, who “tells all about his life and loves.” According to her testimony, and that of his many friends, the 63-year-old Stevens was an avid fisherman, who always woke up early to take in the sunrise. Every morning, he’d bring tea to his wife in bed, and before he’d go out to fish, he’d scribble love notes on her newspaper crossword puzzle. He had an impish sense of humor, frequently updating friends on the progress of his imaginary sister who was a hooker (“Carole’s out of the hospital,” he’d say. “She’s back on her back.”) The neighborhood children loved Stevens so much that they used to ask if he could come out and play. The Englishman’s favorite saying, according to his wife, was “Americans don’t know what a great country this is.” But he lived by another credo: “Being nice to people doesn’t cost a penny, and the return is immeasurable.” Any of us who suspected that Stevens was as oily as some of those he worked for were obviously wrong. His life was worth trumpeting, maybe even as loudly as the Sun trumpeted that “the chalice used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper was discovered in Afghanistan by an American Special Forces commando team hunting for terrorist butcher Osama bin Laden.” It’s a shame hardly anyone got a chance to.
Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
