David Warren considers the decline of boots-on-the-ground reporting and the rise of comfortable bourgeois “journalism”:
Andy Ngo after being assaulted during Antifa protests in Portland, Oregon on 29 June 2019.
When I was a “journalist” — God help me, but it was an increasingly long time ago — my understanding was that the job involved getting into the riot. Andy Ngo may be the only journalist left, unless we count “talking heads” and “scribblers.” Well-informed, at first hand, on events in such towns as Seattle and Portland — where the bourgeoisie now enjoy their “summer of love” — he has been beaten up a few times. For journalism was meant to be a dangerous sport, quite unlike ping-pong.
Alas, and already in Vietnam, I discovered that only the photographers looked directly on the face of battle. This is because they were getting paid for the pics — in cash, but sometimes in prizes. The people who wrote the (frequently misleading) captions were safe in a bar, back in Saigon, or more likely, in the editorial suites of New York. It interested me that the photographers were often rightwing crazies. Whereas, the scribblers were, generally, leftists to a man, or in those days, the very occasional woman. I liked to get my information from photographers, whenever possible, but the scribblers did not. In possession of a fully-formed “narrative” from New York, they had already written their stories.
Am I exaggerating? Less than usual. My caricature points to a flaw in the meejah — cowardice, ignorance, arrogance, and malice, stirred into a rather potent brew. Then we had “editors,” to do the distillation.
