The American Spectator

TAS Live

Mummy Wrap

By George Neumayr on 1.10.05 @ 12:07AM

TOM WOLFE IS AMERICA'S preeminent observer of decaying elites, chronicling and often forecasting their decline in his journalism and novels. In his 1970 book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, he exposed the comic decadence of Leonard Bernstein and his friends, an elite so indifferent to its own survival it feted the Black Panthers at its Park Avenue mansions. In his 1975 book The Painted Word and the 1981 companion book From Bauhaus to Our House, he detailed the effete theories dooming America's art and architecture. He anticipated the decline of a privileged media class in his famous puncturing of the pompous New Yorker under William Shawn -- "Tiny Mummies!" -- and his 1996 novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg," which captures the tendentiousness of television magazine show producing, forecast the scandal at CBS involving Mary Mapes and Dan Rather. Executive editor George Neumayr caught up with Wolfe in Southampton, New York, shortly before publication of I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe's third major novel, to get his observations on today's tiny mummies.

TAS: It has been a year of fiascoes in the media. What are your thoughts on the condition of journalism?
Tom Wolfe: What I see is that there is less news covered today than there was 75 years ago. Seventy-five years ago there were infinitely more newspapers. There were seven when I first arrived in New York City. This led to real competition. Then along came television news and the local monopolies. Most places don't have an afternoon paper and if they do chances are they are owned by the people who put out the morning paper.

Television, meanwhile, does very little reporting as a newspaper would understand it. Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are. They aren't digging up news. When television does dig up news -- a big story, a big scoop -- it is almost always wrong. NBC once broke this huge story about nuclear atomic weaponry in Israel and got it totally wrong. The most interesting thing was the reaction of the management. Its first question was, 'Where did this first appear? What newspaper did you get this out of? What? There was no written source. Are you crazy?'

TAS: So you weren't surprised by the Dan Rather debacle?
Tom Wolfe: I wasn't surprised it happened. The media have a pretty wild history in this respect. Whenever somebody would make up a story, they would say, 'Oh, that's the influence of the New Journalism.' God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

There is an inverse status in television news: the person who leaves the building least is the highest ranked. The anchormen really are the primitive version of the old linotype machine. The anchor's voice converts material written by others into a form that is easily consumable by the audience -- that's what the linotype machine did.

The people who actually gather the news are ranked way down the scale. I was once assigned to do a story on Walter Cronkite after he had been demoted for the only time in his career. He had been demoted in the sense that he became the co-anchor and that was big news. So my story idea was to see how this would change the way he was treated by others. But I missed the big story, which was that he didn't do anything. When he came in at 10 in the morning the program was set by a producer who came in very early and pulled together everything that was on the wires. Cronkite would get to work about 4:30, put on makeup, go over the script, possibly to ensure that he could pronounce all the names. He would describe his role as not that of a reporter but of a managing editor. But he was not like a managing editor. The producer was like a managing editor.

So if television news is the way most people get their news and television gets their news from newspapers and newspapers have settled down into local monopolies and don't have nearly as many reporters looking into anything, then the funnel is much smaller at the beginning. By the time the news gets to television not much is being covered. Yet television is so colorful, so literally colorful, that you get the impression that they are covering everything.

The foreign correspondents pride themselves on the ability to come in cold knowing nothing. There was one case where a correspondent was sent to Tehran during a hostage crisis, and then within 20 minutes of getting off the plane he gives a fluent report of what was happening. What they did was give him an ear piece and a producer in New York read AP copy to him.

Every now and then somebody like Dan Rather will put on an Afghan costume and you will see him with some turban thing on this head and robes walking up some rocks, wanting to feel like a reporter. Rather interviewed Saddam Hussein. But what this is, is getting the party line from a person instead of from a document. He was being anything but tough on Saddam Hussein. People like the handout better when it is being read by Saddam Hussein.

TAS: What did you make of Rather's fake-but-accurate defense?
Tom Wolfe: I think that is just called covering your back side. The anchors can have a lot of influence whenever they want to stick their oars in, because they are getting the biggest salaries. That was true of the astronauts at the beginning. They were celebrities, so if they got together to demand this or that they would get their way. Dan Rather certainly wasn't going to say he was wrong just because this, this, and this right-wing source had come up with proof that it was a forgery. It was such a stupid kind of thing because anybody who has ever used a typewriter could tell at one glance that this was not typewritten.

TAS: Are the tiny mummies these days a liberal media monolith that is cracking up?
Tom Wolfe: I'm not sure it is dying because they are liberal or not. But readership is declining. Younger people are getting their news from the Internet or television. Most people don't read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page. There was a great story at the New York Herald Tribune. One of the most colorful employees they ever had was a guy name Lucius Beebe. He was the pro, he was the guy under fire, great reporter, great writer, fast. So one night something had happened at the very last moment, which exploded the lead editorial, and they had to get somebody to write a new one in 15 minutes. So everyone said, 'Where's Beebe?' So they brought the old pro upstairs with the copy boy right behind him to take the rush copy. Like a pro he turns out that first page in less than a minute and hands it to the copy boy. And one of the copy editors comes in and says, 'What the hell is this, Beebe?' It was the word 'nevertheless' repeated 80 some times. Beebe said, 'Well, that's all your editorials ever say anyways.'

TAS: What do you think of the Internet?
Tom Wolfe: The Internet is the modern form of knitting. In the old days women who had nothing to do would knit, but at least you got something out of it -- a pair of socks, maybe a scarf, occasionally a little bedspread. That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning.

TAS: Will the Internet change journalism significantly?
Tom Wolfe: It could. It is perfectly conceivable that the next generation would be so used to getting news off the Internet that the whole focus would shift. Think of all the printing presses that would then be useless.

The Internet doesn't really change anything, it just speeds it up. You are pretty much free of commercials except these damn pop-up things. You get everything faster. You can also get great pictures on the Internet. But, it is not pleasant to read things on the Internet with a backlit screen. It is hard on your eyes. Eventually maybe they will find a way to make it a lot easier to read.

The other problem is that you have to scroll. It is primitive in the sense that the Internet is a scrolling medium. A printed book with pages was such an advance over scrolling. To go back to scrolls is to step into the past. That goes back to monks in the 13th century. A lot has happened since the 13th century to improve the technology of reading, and so far no one has come up, for sheer reading ease, with anything better than hard copy pages.

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