We celebrated the press appropriately Saturday night in Little Rock a short time before they made an utter mess of it in Washington.
Several old-timers in the Little Rock newspaper business gathered with other interested attendees at the Clinton School of Public Service. An old friend and colleague was presenting a program on her journalist dad's book, Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, which she edited.
She helped him write the latter part of it as his energy declined toward his death last year.
Anne Farris Rosen now lives in Washington and teaches journalism at the University of Maryland. In the glorious madness of the Little Rock newspaper war in the 1980s, she worked near-heroically with me and others covering Arkansas politics for the Arkansas Gazette. She uncovered the scandal of phantom dining guests on an expense account that brought down then-Attorney General Steve Clark, who might have been governor otherwise.
One autumn day in 1990 I up and quit the Gannett-ized Gazette and walked a couple of blocks to become senior editor of the Arkansas Times. A couple of hours later Anne showed up at my new desk, stern, horrified, seemingly hurt. She demanded to know: What the hell was I doing? We were colleagues, a team. What we'd been doing together was important. How could I have acted so abruptly, so selfishly, without telling her, or anyone?
Here was why: She and others would have talked me out of it. Shamed me out of it. And I didn't want to be there at the paper's end, and the end was coming. I always live in fast-forward, well past the moment, which is where the emotionally healthy live.
Anne's dad, John N. Herbers, was a reporter for UPI before becoming the New York Times' man in the South covering the seismic explosion of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. He wrote about Emmett Till and the Birmingham bombing. He interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
He was taking the family to the beach in Panama City when a call came of re-ignited trouble in St. Augustine, Fla. But guess what: There was a beach in St. Augustine. So, he simply drove the wife and kids there instead. White thugs hanging from a pickup terrorized their motel, so the family went home while dad stayed, as ever, to do his job.
Anne told us Saturday night what we already knew--that she never had a chance. She was going to be a journalist.
Jay Barth, the political scientist from Hendrix, asked Anne this question: He was struck by the strong brotherhood of newspaper people, as evidenced by the affection of old local colleagues turning out for her presentation. Could she talk a little about being in a family of a New York Times reporter in the South in the '60s as he covered epic news in a way that was surely isolating or alienating from the surrounding and resentful culture?
She said her folks had good non-journalist friends in those days, but, yes, only a few. The real friends were the other journalists.
They competed hard when the news was breaking. Then they bonded with cheap beer in a kind of cocoon during that rare gap--after dispatches were filed and editors satisfied and before the next call came of trouble in Selma or Montgomery or Jackson or St. Augustine, and of an editor's command to get there right now.
Newspaper people aren't normal. They're not supposed to be.
I asked Anne: Her dad worked in an era of a great journalistic moral voice, chronicling the civil rights struggle and the war in Vietnam. And now she was telling us we're entering a reborn era of racial struggle, with police shootings of blacks and neo-Nazis getting presidentially mainstreamed in Charlottesville. Did journalism have a great moral voice now, something akin to what it brought to the task in the 1960s?
Her honest answer made short: She didn't know.
Now let me tell you what contemporary journalism's moral voice will never be.
It will never be the Washington media establishment gathered in formal wear with celebrity guests for a smug, orgiastic nationally televised nerds' imitation of the Oscars, featuring a perfectly fine, talented and acerbic comic delivering insults that would bring down a comedy house or regale a late-night talk show audience but will land awkwardly and inappropriately year after year at that hideous White House Correspondents Dinner.
Just stop it. Please. You're under attack from a hostile, imperious president. You bloody yourselves with such tone-deaf indulgence.
When the president of the United States is calling you "fake," don't respond by being fake.
Go your route. Do your work. Satisfy yourself and your editor with a fair and thorough day's dispatch. Then go to a midtown dive with colleagues and drink beer. Then get up and do it all over again.
Now that is a real journalistic celebration.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/01/2018