Horror movie journalists (w/poll)

A few months ago, my assistant picked up two DVD collections, 50 Horror Classics, and 50 Chilling Classics. That's about 200 hours of spine tingling good times to be enjoyed with popcorn on lazy evenings - although the distinction between a "horror" movie and a "chiller" still escapes me.

And in these films - heavy on the Bela Legosi and mostly B-grade and lower - I noticed something rather interesting. For more, flipside.

I began to see a pattern. Most often, the protagonists in these old black-and-white "fright-night" features were reporters. Journalists. Somebody sent from a newspaper. By the 10th film in a row that adhered to this trope, I started wondering why the previous generation so idolized the stalwart and intrepid ink slinger, why was the catalyst for these lurid stories usually some plucky cub reporter?

And why did the generation that preceded us lionize people like Edward R. Murrow? Well, from a dramaturgical standpoint it makes sense: there's only two stories we have - man leaves town, stranger comes to town. That makes storytelling easy. The reporter is a sleuth on a mission; there's a festering evil hidden plot afoot and it's the relentless journalist who digs and digs and keeps digging until it's in the bag. Kinda like a private eye.

Or in Murrow's case, there's the sheer bravery of wandering into the buzz saw of a combat zone, where the foreign correspondent risks death to bring the story back to us. You can't get much more noble than that.

What happened? How did these people become, as Stephen Colbert branded them, nothing more than stenographers for the administration? How did we get saddled with Gregoriesand Kleinsand Brodersand Goldbergs?

These aren't reporters. They are lapdog hacks. They hew to the safe, and they bring to their work all the passion of a minimum-wage burger-flipper. Punch in. Punch out. But it didn't used to be that way.

Ace reporters were bulldogs and bloodhounds, and once on the trail of a hot story, they'd use every trick in the book - from social engineering to pre-texting to digging through trash cans. Damn the consequences - getting the truth and getting it to the public was their mission and the good ones were legendary.

Guys like Donald Barlett and James Steele, who last year got the sack from Time:

Their body of work is a testament to an exacting, relentless, painstaking and meticulous determination that other reporters could only shake their heads at as they admired it from afar. What they practiced was the opposite of "Gotcha!" journalism, or quick hits, or cheap shots. Rather, they burrowed in for months -- sometimes years -- at a time, and then returned with an examination of entire systems gone awry, whether it be an oil crisis, the nuclear waste dilemma, corporate welfare run rampant, the nation's ramshackle tax system, or the economy itself.

The last of a dying breed. Everybody saw this for what it was - an end to the Fourth Estate, because ruffling feathers just isn't done anymore:

"This," said Sandy Padwe, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a pretty fair investigative reporter himself, "is a disgrace. Two of the best investigative reporters ever, and they're on the street? It's a fucking travesty."

John Huey, editor in chief of Time Inc., told the Times' Kit Seelye that as he cut away at corporate costs, he sought unsuccessfully to shift Barlett and Steele to the payroll of one or another of the company's magazines, but he was unable to find an editor willing to take on the expense. "They're very good, but very expensive, and I couldn't get anyone to take them on their budget."

For his part, Steele told Seelye that "apparently the decision was made at the corporate level not to fund this kind of work."

So we now have the script of a new kind of horror movie, a EllisonesqueI Have No Mouth and I Must Scream reality in which we, the citizens, see exactly what's happening, but our media presents us with an imaginary simulacrum of truth, where Democrats stumble and the President offers yet another "bold" and "daring" new plan, certain to succeed.

I think it's all traceable back to the death of the Humanities and Liberal Arts. The evil zombie Reagan back yet to wound us further. The triumph of the MBA. Because from that point, journalism became a cut-and-dried business, formulaic and unimaginative. All that mattered was turning your degree into hard cash. The panache of the horror movie reporters became a liability in this new world of book deals and TV show appearances. Perfect hair and straight teeth meant more than landing a scoop. But all isn't lost.

Charlie Savage is still getting it done. Seymour Hersh is holding the line. And so many others continue to keep the flame of investigative journalism flickering, no matter how tenuously, against the darkness of corporate profit.

As bloggers, we do our part to analyze and sift and cross-check and evaluate the output of the media. But we need a strong and fearless press to hold the wealthy and powerful in check. No grand conclusions here, save the obvious: Subscribe to the New York Review of Books, and buy any copy of Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly that catches your interest. Keep good journalism alive in any way you think helps.