Why more Gonzo journalism is not the answer to Trump
Much as we miss Hunter Thompson, it is a different type of journalism that will bring down Trumpism
“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes… understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose… Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”
WHEN Hunter S. Thompson wrote those lines during the 1972 presidential campaign, he was at the height of his fame and his powers as America’s foremost renegade journalist.
Thompson harnessed the duality of rage and optimism of the ’60s hippie generation into the way he approached his journalism, and by ’72 Gonzo, the genre of journalism Thompson had invented, had been refined into a powerful and effective tool to mock and ridicule the political elite — not just Nixon, but Democrats like Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie as well.
Thompson’s particular forte was dissecting the death of the American Dream . . . it was his obsession and he came back to it again and again in his writing.
Us Gonzo fans are a strange breed with our Hawaiian shirts, aviator sunglasses and habit of quoting to each other our favourite lines out of Thompson’s books before erupting into fits of laughter.
More than anyone or anything else, HST was the reason I chose journalism as a career. I’ve done a radio documentary about him, written a play about him (yet to be brought to stage) and even gave my youngest son the middle name of Hunter.
He spawned hundreds of imitators — some good, like John Birmingham, most pretty bad.
But much as I worship the oeuvre of Hunter S. Thompson, I am sick to death of reading articles speculating how he would respond to the state of American politics if he was alive today, or lamenting that Gonzo journalism is needed more than ever in the era of the Trump presidency.
Because the last thing we need in 2016 is more Gonzo journalism. What we need is a dedication to the truth, to facts and to uncovering corruption, tyranny and dishonesty. In other words, good old fashioned reportage.
Everywhere you look, you can’t help but trip over Gonzo journalism. There are some brilliant examples around, such as the British journalist Laurie Penny’s coverage of the Republican and Democrat conventions last year, or Matt Taibbi’s sustained excellence at Thompson’s alma mater, Rolling Stone.
But Trump is so ridiculous and his administration is so dysfunctional that it has almost rendered both Gonzo and satire irrelevant.
THOMPSON’S approach to journalism was borne out of utter contempt for the lamely objective and compliant journalism of his era.
Pre-Watergate, journalism suffered from overt politeness and respect for those in power, almost to the point of obsequiousness. To Thompson, nothing should ever be off the record, and the cosy relationships between journalists and politicians did immense damage to the watchdog role that journalism should have.
Gonzo journalism was so groundbreaking because no-one had dared — at least to the same degree as Thompson — to question and challenge the conventional approach to political journalism. Thompson drew on the obscenity-laden satire of Lenny Bruce, the Beat writers, and muckraking journalists of the past to establish a style through which he could expose the hypocrisy of the American political system.
By embellishing the truth and plain making stuff up, Thompson lifted the lid on the reality of late-sixties/early-seventies America more than sober objective journalism ever could. He said things that “serious” journalists wouldn’t dare say in public, and reflected the outrage of his generation at the futility of the Vietnam War.
What made Thompson’s work so iconic and memorable and daring is that he blazed a trail that had not been travelled before him. Remember, this was before Twitter and a million Facebook memes, before Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live, before The Daily Show and John Oliver, Michael Moore and The Simpsons.
Much is made of Thompson’s drug-fuelled antics which were an integral part of the immersive Gonzo experience, but at its core, his journalism had a deadly serious moral imperative.
Almost single-handedly, he shaped the image of Nixon as the man who killed the American Dream, accusing him of being a shyster and a crook surrounded by a cabal of criminals well before anyone knew what Watergate meant.
Nixon hated the press, and Thompson returned the favour.
All you need is to read Thompson in his prime to understand the corruption of American politics that has led to the situation it now finds itself in, with a demagogic tyrant at the helm, intent on grabbing power by destroying the institutions that are designed to hold it in check, particularly the courts and the media. Thompson anticipated the emergence of a Trump as long ago as the early-70s.
But for all Hunter Thompson’s brilliance and insight — and never more so than his fortnightly reports for Rolling Stone from the 1972 campaign trail — it wasn’t Gonzo journalism that brought down Nixon.
It was the hard daily slog of incremental investigative journalism by two unknown young reporters at The Washington Post, doing the unglamorous and tedious work of knocking on doors, making phone calls, building contacts and reading mountains of documents.
Watergate changed journalism even more than Gonzo. It ushered in a golden age of investigative journalism and ended the cosy, stale collaborative media-politics duopoly that made Thompson so angry in the first place.
An entire generation of young journalists were inspired to follow Woodward and Bernstein’s lead.
No, we don’t need more Gonzo journalism. We need more facts.
JOURNALISM of the kind that uncovered Watergate and brought down Nixon is not easy, and it isn’t cheap. It’s constant, hard work. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had numerous setbacks and doors slammed in their faces, but eventually built a body of evidence that was so compelling the political establishment couldn’t ignore it and Nixon was on the verge of being impeached when he resigned.
The nature of investigative journalism is summed by the final scene of All The President’s Men — one of my favourite movie scenes of all time — when the camera peels away from a close up of a TV broadcast of Nixon’s second inauguration to show both Woodward and Bernstein pounding away at their typewriters oblivious to what is on the TV screen.
The scary reality is that Watergate may have been missed today.
In straitened financial circumstances with fewer resources available in their newsroom, an editor is just as likely to say to a Woodward and Bernstein “sorry, but I can’t spare you from courts to spend weeks chasing these leads”.
So by all means, let’s celebrate Gonzo journalism if it can make us laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of Trump’s America and can make us angry enough to get up out of our seats and do something about it.
Let’s also acknowledge that there is quite enough Gonzo journalism around already. And we definitely don’t need more second-rate Gonzo journalism — the internet is already overflowing with it.
Let’s recognise that Trump didn’t emerge because of a deficit of Gonzo journalism.
Gonzo journalism may help us get through these troubling times, but it won’t be what topples Trump.
Right now, what we need more than anything is facts and investigation. And we need to support the media organisations who are prepared to do the dirty work in the face of incredible intimidation and provocation from the White House itself.
As Bernstein himself put it at the weekend: “We’re not enemies of the American people. In fact, we’re the last resort of the American people to a dictatorial and authoritarian-inclined president.”
We need to say to The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and other reputable news organisations that we’ve got their backs and the best way to do that is by paying for quality journalism. Putting our hands into our wallets and financially supporting the same kind of intense investigative journalism that brought down Richard Nixon.
Because without it, who else is really going to hold this bastard to account.
