The Weekly Screed (#916)

The Popinjay principle

By David Benjamin

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

— attributed variously to Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Artemus Ward, etc.

PARIS — I was scheduled to address the Paris chapter of the British National; Union of Journalists this week. I pictured a banquet hall thronged with editors, photographers, correspondents and steely-eyed cynics. So, I prepared a speech appropriate to the occasion’s majesty. When I arrived, my “crowd” turned out to be six amiable reporters, including an American and two familiar friends, sitting around a table in a charmingly shabby bistro on the quai de l’Hotel de Ville. So I stifled my grandeur and partook of a far less momentous but eminently pleasant conversation. Still, I hate to waste a speech. So here, addressing the state of journalism and its place in the cosmos, is my harangue…

We don’t belong.

The very term under which this group meets, “union of journalists,” comes to me as an oxymoron. Journalists, fierce in their independence and jealous of their autonomy, don’t naturally “unite.” We don’t belong comfortably among normal people and we barely belong together.

 

Each of us knows at least one “colleague” whom we would, if given the license, strangle the son of a bitch with the cord of his own phone recharger.

A classic example of journalistic solidarity emerged from the press briefings of the new Trump regime. Sean Spicer not only lied brazenly to the White House press corps, but insulted individual correspondents in personal terms. By the time Sarah Huckabee Sanders had settled into the job of presidential press secretary— succeeding the exhausted and discredited Spicer — there had been a hundred incidents in which Trump’s spokesperson had demeaned or silenced a reporter, or had lied to the entire room, or called one of the White House press corps a liar.

If journalism’s White House elite had been any sort of union — like, say, the United Steelworkers, or even a delegation from the local Rotary Club, they might well have taken that very first offense against a fellow professional, risen as one and walked out in protest. Even if they hadn’t done this the first time, they would have by and by perceived the contempt of the Trump/Spicer/Sanders crew, and they would have eventually boycotted the whole pointless exercise.

Ironically, a walkout did transpire, but it was Sanders who turned the trick. By shutting down the charade, she exposed what the august White House press corps failed to get together and concede — that a briefing in the Trump regime generates no credible news. It is 100 percent — to use the president’s term — bullshit.

The White House press briefing has always been what historian Daniel Boorstin called a “pseudo-event,” a stage show that signifies very little. A Trump pseudo-event is a mutation that not only conveys nothing of significance but usually, somehow, soils, diminishes and creeps out everyone involved. But, what if just one of Spicer’s, or Sanders’, or Trump’s insulted journalists… 

Can you imagine one single lied-to and spit-on reporter standing up, singing a bar of “Alice’s Restaurant” and walking out? And if two did it? And if the whole bunch of ’em just stood up, sang a bar of “Alice’s Restaurant” and walked out? You know what would happen?

  

It would be news.

 

Because this is a spasm of common sense and community that these Washington press divas cannot conceive. The political class has the media divided against itself. A group like the White House press corps suggests a sort of special belonging. They are the chosen few. But this counterfeit chosenness serves to set its every member against one another in competition for the pseudo-event’s tiny scraps of evanescence.

Journalists share a profession. We have (largely unattainable) standards and ethics and a vital social mission. But what is our stock in trade? The scoop. The “exclusive” is our Grail. We are out, every moment, to beat one another. We don’t belong among our peers. And we don’t belong out there, among the big shots and spokespeople — because they will inevitably seduce us. And we don’t belong among the masses — because they think we’re smartasses.

And they’re right.

For example, I’ve come to think of the archetypal “reporter” as a character in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, named Popinjay. He appears in the kangaroo-court trial of Clevinger, convened by “the bloated colonel with the big fat mustache.” In mid-trial, the bloated colonel orders Popinjay (“the corporal who could take shorthand”) to “Read me back that last line.”

Popinjay reads it: “Read me back that last line.”

A moment later, the enraged colonel orders Popinjay to read back someone else’s last line, which happens to be Popinjay’s: “Read me back that last line.”

In this wonderful, maddening scene, Popinjay embodies three of the qualities that every journalist strives to perfect. He is accurate. He is unswayed and impartial. And he pisses off the most powerful guy in the room. When it’s all over, Popinjay’s transcipt will prove the cruel injustice of Clevinger’s trial. It will be history. It will be true. And Popinjay will be a smartass to thank.

Today in America, the bloated colonel is Donald Trump, convening kangaroo courts, bullying reporters and reveling in cruelty. Among the Popinjays currently taking Trump down in shorthand is Peter Baker of the New York Times. Baker has deviated from the Times’ cautious he said/he said formula because a president as mendacious and malignant as Trump requires an unprecedented journalism.

Baker has refined a technique in which he records word-for-word the bloated colonel’s bellowing. Then, in the next ’graph, Baker quotes Trump verbatim, making the opposite point on a previous occasion (or sometimes earlier in the same speech). This cool juxtaposition of bluster-on-lie is not editorial comment by Baker. It’s not opinion. But its naked factuality irritates the bloated colonel. It hoists him atop his private mountain of bullshit. Baker is doing pure Popinjay, not because he wants to, but because he must. This president’s lies, one by one, have to be answered on the spot lest we all drown in their multitude.

Nobody, after all, reads the fact-checkers 24 hours later on page D22.

Baker, in his instant debunking paragraphs, is taking a risk. He’s drawing outside the Times’ traditional lines — but doing so with the Times’ permission. Nowadays, outside the lines is where the conscientious reporter must practice. He or she can’t belong, because this would mean belonging to the bloated colonel and the chicken brass who spin his lies and praise his tan.

 

We don’t belong. It is our role to mistrust, even sometimes one another. Our role is to stand aside, outside, beyond — and observe. It is to be there every time, at every meeting, every speech, every trial, and to remember those that went before. Our job is to peek, to peer, to intrude, to be rude. It is to hide behind the drapes, to sneak along the corridors of power, to suss the motives of our subjects. We have a duty to know more than the average bear, then turn around and teach the average bear what he does not know and — often — what he does not want to know. Our duty is to challenge his prejudices, shatter his illusions and expose not just that his heroes have feet of clay but that they are clay from head to toe.

We are not popular. We’ll never be popular. If we get a thousand “likes,” we’ve betrayed our likers.

Most people, after all, hate their teachers and can’t wait to get out of school.

We are school. We’ll never be loved. We’re Popinjay, crouched — with a knowing smirk — below the dais, taking shorthand. We don’t belong.