A few years ago, I lived at the beach in Santa Monica, California. I had a two-story rectangular beach house, and in the afternoons, I would sit on my balcony, smoke a cigar, sip a bourbon, and watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.
One day, though, I was disturbed by a lot of alarming hubbub, with ambulance sirens, crowds of people, and loud police radio squawks, from the next street over. And then, fluttering above, there appeared several news helicopters making noisy circles in the air. It was very distracting and pretty much ruined my cocktail hour.
I leaned over the balcony to get a better look — far enough to crane my neck, not far enough to spill my drink — and I suddenly noticed, right below my balcony, a news van pulling up in front of my house, directly in front of my driveway (conveniently marked by a “Do NOT Park Here” sign), and several purposeful people got out and started unloading video equipment.
“You can’t park there,” I called down. A well-dressed lady — the reporter, I figured — looked up from her small mirror.
“We’re media,” she said as if that settled that, and she went back to her powdering and primping.
That, of course, didn’t even come close to settling that.
“I understand,” I said, in my best mansplaining voice. “But you’re still blocking my driveway, so you still can’t park there.”
She looked up at me, squinted, took a small, barely perceptible glance at my drink — Ah, I could hear her thinking, the local drunk — and she repeated, just in case I didn’t get it the first time: “It’s OK. We’re media.” And she gestured to the van and the guys with the boom microphones and the cameras.
The gang started bustling around again, slamming doors and hoisting equipment. She tossed her mirror into her bag.
I rattled the ice in my glass to get her attention. “Hey!” I called down. “I don’t care who you are. You can’t park in front of my garage. I absolutely will have you towed.”
“We’re a news organization, sir. We’re press. We can park where we want. It’s the First Amendment,” said a short, high-strung young man with a clipboard and a complicated mobile phone headset.
“Let me be clear,” I said, in my best cranky local drunk voice. “I will have you towed. You cannot block my garage. I need to be able to pull my car out of my driveway. There’s a chance…” — and here I dropped my voice just a bit and held my drink aloft — “…there’s a chance I may need to step out for a refill.”
This was more than the reporter could take.
“You don’t understand, sir,” she cried. “This is an important breaking story. Margaux Hemingway has died!”
This turned out to be true, but since it wasn’t one of the three things (major earthquake, tsunami, large cash offer) that would cause me to loosen my “no parking in my driveway” policy, I held my ground. They sighed and huffed and puffed and shook their heads at the amazing violation of First Amendment rights that glowered down at them, drink in hand, from the balcony, but in the end, they moved the van.
And I sat and finished my cigar and crunched softly on the melted ice left in my glass and thought to myself, Who the hell is Margaux Hemingway?
For the record: She was the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway. She was a supermodel and struggled with drug addiction for many years. She was famous enough, apparently, for her death to merit news helicopters and First Amendment squabbles, but what strikes me now, years later, is how utterly certain the television news reporter and her crew were that their job entitled them to a set of outlandish privileges, including breaching the foundational laws of beachside living: You cannot park in front of my garage.
If you could graph the rate of increase in arrogance and pomposity of the press from that moment to this, it would be a steeply unbroken line up and to the right. They always seem to be in a state of nervous alarm, covering a story as trivial as a minor celebrity’s death or as false and hollow as, say, Russian “collusion” or a Florida governor’s use of the biggest grocery and pharmacy chain in his state to distribute a lifesaving vaccine. When they make a mistake, either intentionally or through incompetence, it’s always, always to the detriment of their political enemies and in service of their political friends.
They are always blocking our driveways and interrupting our peaceful cocktail hours. It’s time we all just shook the ice in our glasses and told them to park somewhere else.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
