#27 | January 29 - February 11, 1998  

by Abram Kalashnikov

In his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that William Casey had trouble explaining foreign policy to the President. Because the President didn't like to read, he and other Reagan aides made up movies for him to watch to help explain foreign policy issues.

"Since Reagan did not read many novels," Woodward wrote, "but watched movies, the CIA began to produce profiles of leaders that could be shown to the President... One of the best was of Israeli Prime Minister Begin. It opened with footage of bulldozers at a Nazi concentration camp, and Begin's voice-over, 'Never, never again...'"

If that was what the CIA had to do for Reagan, just imagine what your average reporter has to do for John Q. Reader, who in many cases is even dumber, if you can believe this, than the former President. Reporters have the added burden of trying to sell their pieces to a public that, unlike Reagan, is not obligated to read them. The result is an almost impossible task: selling an inherently unpalatable product to a mentally impaired audience.

You can see hack anguish at this state of affairs in headlines like "Bedtime For Boris" (Russia Today), "Moscow Confidential" (John Helmer of the Moscow Tribune), "The Russians Are Coming!" (Nina Khruscheva, no less, of the LA Times), and "Rebirth of a Nation" (a book, authored by John Lloyd). Even the eXile got in the act last year, putting the headline "Baldfellas" above a story about Russia's bankers.

The constant awareness of his subjugation before the film and video world is only part of the terrible predicament of the newspaper reporter, who in any case usually becomes a personal failure the instant he succeeds professionally. That's because on the one hand, success means the realization of all of his youthful literary dreams, in that hundreds of thousands of people read his writing every week. But on the other hand, the compromises he has had to make in order to secure that goal have ensured that those same millions will be so bored that they'll instantly forget everything but the general gist of his pieces-the ultimate literary nightmare.

So how, as a hack, can you even begin to right the terrible wrong that's been done to you? The usual answer is not to quit the business and actually try to write something provocative. Instead, the vast majority of reporters stay in the business and try to work within the outlined boundaries. The result is more of the same old simplistic, Reagan-safe stuff, only dotted throughout with tiny psycho-protests-little puns and allusions intended to let the reader know that the reporter could have been a witty and trenchant litterateur if he'd wanted, if it weren't for his dumb job.

Tropes like alliteration and the movie heads above are the usual "literary" devices one finds squeezed into news articles. But writers who are particularly sensitive about their nonliterary status, like Carol J. Williams of the LA Times, tend to leave their pieces so bedecked with literary affectations that an educated person has a difficult time reading them without a welder's mask:

"YEKATERINBURG, Russia-In place of the heady incense that bathes the crypt of his imperial forebears, a nauseous blend of construction dust, cigarette smoke and the odor of decomposing bodies in the morgue two floors below wafts over the jumble of bones that is all that remains of the last czar of Russia.

"Card-playing security guards and an iron gate seal off the cluttered laboratory holding the royal remains of Nicholas II and his family-precautions taken since one of the czar's ribs was pilfered three years ago.

"Film crews, historians and dignitaries deemed to deserve a glimpse of Yekaterinburg's most renowned relics are ushered in almost daily for a look at the last of the Romanovs-nine specimen trays displaying what could be found of each victim's skeleton, all now sealed as criminal evidence under clear plastic domes fixed by the local prosecutor's wax and wire."

Williams covers the alliteration requirement with "dignitaries deemed to deserve," "renowned relics," "wax and wire," "bathes, -bears, blend, bodies, below, jumble, bones, (all in one sentence!)," "royal remains," and "card-playing... cluttered."

In fact, the worship of the alliterative ideal in her bureau is so strong that her subordinate, Vanora Bennett, led a piece about cats with the line, "With a flash of fur and a shiver of whiskers..." Honor among hacks!

By the third paragraph of Williams's piece the reader is concerned that the piece might not contain a lame pun, but Williams quickly soothes him with the cute sub-headline "Bones of Contention." And Williams also works to make sure that the obligatory pop-cultural reference works its way into the story:

"Most forensic investigators insist that the missing daughter is Marie, 19 at the time of the executions. But one researcher, the late William Maples of Florida, insisted that the youngest, Anastasia, was unaccounted for, rekindling the unlikely legend of a survivor, one most recently perpetuated by the animated film 'Anastasia.'"

Olfactory imagery-a necessity in all compositions, as all high school grads know-she takes care of with an astonishing array of modifiers in the lead sentence: "heady incense... bathes the crypt... nauseous blend... dust... cigarette smoke... odor... decomposing ... wafts." Pee-yew!

These are all glaring symptoms of half-shackled reporters trying vainly to stick their signature on the main act, which is the same old commercialized press formula. Like roadies taking a bow at a Led Zeppelin show, reporters' "creative" contributions usually jump out unpleasantly at the reader. Listen to how awkward the word "plunk" sounds in the following passage from Molly Colin of the Christian Science Monitor:

"The principal reason for increased car ownership is that consumers have more money and more choices than before. Car buyers in Soviet times could face as many as five years on waiting lists, where Communist Party elite took priority.

"Today, Russians can plunk down their rubles at any car dealership."

Formula journalism and wit don't mix very well. Multiply a negative number by a positive and you get a still bigger negative number. The risk of abject failure is much higher than in any other kind of writing.

Should journalists not even try to write with style? Of course not-no one should be boring on purpose. But they ought to realize that the peculiar conditions of their job make trying to be interesting a high wire act. The Williamsesque style might not be out of place in an adult-ed creative writing class. But on a wire service beamed all around the world to people wanting instant analysis of complex news events, it can be freakish and disturbing-even smelly.