New Journalism and the Truth Behind the Facts

By DON ROLLINS

“Go to any neighborhood where the poor live, and tell the truth about what you see.” — Jimmy Breslin

Few documentaries on print journalism are as engaging yet even-handed as HBO’s recently released Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists. Unsparing in their treatment of the title figures’ considerable personal and professional failings, the film’s directors nonetheless give the two journalists their iconoclastic due.

And what’s due Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and the dozen or so other reporter-writers associated with the “New Journalism” movement is considerable; for the method of reporting they pioneered (some would argue revived) provided a subtext for a critical, often turbulent era.

To understand the New Journalists is to understand the 1960s. Call it a cultural revolution or just an extended adolescence, there could be no doubting the changing of the guard in American society and politics. This intergenerational schism was soon felt in big-outlet urban newsrooms as adventurous editors began taking chances on the young, edgy reporters with local followings.

For this journalistic avant-garde, objectivity taken to the extreme only dehumanizes the art of storytelling. As described in 1972 by fellow New Journalist Tom Wolfe, the print media milieu in which he, Breslin, Hamill began their careers was sterile and predictable: “They [mainstream media reporters] tended to be what is known as “feature writers.” What they had in common was that they all regarded the newspaper as a motel you checked into overnight on the road to the final triumph. The idea was to get a job on a newspaper, keep body and soul together, pay the rent, get to know “the world,” accumulate “experience,” perhaps work some of the fat off your style—then, at some point, quit cold, say goodbye to journalism, move into a shack somewhere, work night and day for six months, and light up the sky with the final triumph. The final triumph was known as The Novel.”

By comparison the earthier, more activist New Journalists were looking for what they termed “the truth behind the facts” - the sum total of which could be only found by incorporating the stories of those within the story itself. Thus for the New Journalists, the question was not simply what happened, but to whom and why.

When describing the tenets undergirding New Journalism, Wolfe listed four. On the occasion of his death in 2018, The New Yorker staff writer Emily Witt summarized them in short form: 1. scene-by-scene construction; 2. realistic dialogue; 3. a third-person point of view (where the reader feels as if he or she is inside a character’s mind), and then; in contrast to traditional newspaper journalism, a descriptive eye, in which a subject’s clothing, manners, eating, and living room are as important for the writer to document as the subject’s words.

Over the course of New Journalism’s 30-year wax-and-wane, Wolfe’s analysis and writing style attracted withering criticism for his use of editorial license. Likewise Breslin, Hamill and others applying their methods. Yet their semi-embedded approach and New York street smarts resonated with a mix of rank-and-file liberals, unionists, blue collar workers, minorities and Democratic politicians glad to have large-readership contributors on their side.

But by the mid-’80s it became clear mainstream print journalism was no longer interested in reporters’ riffs on their stories. Media autopsies on New Journalism challenged its legitimacy as a distinct genre, while even Breslin rejected the label: “Believe me, there is no new journalism. It is a gimmick to say there is … Storytelling is older than the alphabet and that is what it is all about.”

But even if New Journalism was little more than an undifferentiated label used to describe a populist moment in time, there is no denying the power of putting names, faces and places to American injustice. Border walls, government shutdowns, mass shootings, white supremacy — all echo with the New Journalist reminder there’s truth behind many a fact.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister and substance abuse counselor living in Pittsburgh, Pa. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2019

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