Journalism 101: Drunk & Disorderly
It’s been a while since I did a Journalism 101 piece, but this article at CJR Daily made me think it’s time to remedy that:
Published in the winter 2007 volume of Journalism History, “Depression, Drink and Dissipation” finds that almost half of the best people to ever push a noun against a verb in newsprint were debilitated by depression, serious anxiety, or bipolar disorder; over a third were titanic drunks, pill-poppers, or opium-addicts; nearly a third were serial philanderers, and a sizable bunch were misogynists, man-eaters, or violent bullies. In almost every case, the tendency to booze, carouse, or otherwise self-annihilate developed or seriously deepened during their days in journalism. All this is enough to make Underwood, who left a career covering politics for the Seattle Times to teach at the University of Washington, wonder whether “these behaviors and the choice of journalism and writing as a career are perhaps not unrelated.” Well, yeah.
One interesting question that remains is whether the findings, besides holding a wealth of amusing details, hold deeper significance for the news. Should we care about a reporter’s personal problems?
Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin answer with a burped, “Hell, yes.” For over a decade, the two ex-hard drinkers and legendary newsmen have been saying that print owes its readership woes to a dead corporate air in the newsroom. “Everything’s more restrained and we’ve lost a certain edge,” Hamill told the Denver Post in 1995. Meanwhile, Breslin knows what’s missing: “It’s the drinking.” They grouse that today’s reporters forgo drinking clubs and bawdy pals in favor of health clubs and quiet homes.
Their remarks call up a romantic image of crapulous newsmen throwing cigarette butts on the floor and writing with wet towels wrapped around their throbbing heads. But let’s not forget the consequences. Underwood lists nineteen literary journalists, including Agee, Ring Lardner, and Robert Benchley, who died from drinking. Seven others, among them George Orwell and Mark Twain, killed themselves smoking. William Dean Howells and A.J. Liebling were two of thirteen who ate their way to an early grave. Then there are the suicides: goodbye Gloria Emerson, Ernest Hemingway, and Hunter S. Thompson.
In my own experience, it’s not hard to find alcoholics in newsrooms. (These editors are not necessarily my immediate supervisors: Like a rainforest canopy, there can be layer upon layer of editors at a newspaper, serving nebulous and even outright mysterious roles.)
I had an editor who would put the paper together from down the street via a phone and a reserved seat at the local bar every afternoon. Another literally had a bottle of scotch in his bottom drawer. And there was the editor who would stagger into his office at 10, close the door and shut the blinds, turn the CNN up to the deafening level and then not leave until 4, when alcoholic fumes potent enough to set ablaze would follow him out.
I’m in the camp that believes it’s the personality types attracted to journalism that lead to substance abuse rather than journalism driving one to drink. Pissed-off, cynical, in love with the sound of their own voices, in love with catching others in a lie, curious to the point of creeping others out — if that’s not a journalist, it’s the creepy guy next to you at a seedy bar.
As the article says, though, this kind of thing is less and less accepted as time goes on. Gone are the days when you could smell alcohol on someone’s breath in a staff meeting while they filled multiple plastic ashtrays with stubbed-out cigarettes. Staffers now have to self-destruct in their off-hours.
