By Joel Thurtell
What if you’re an elite newspaper and your lunch is being eaten by the very supermarket tabloids that normally bring a sneer of loathing to your collective editorial face?
The very kinds of sources that sell damaging information about celebrities are not coming to you, because you don’t pay for news.
You take the high road.
You are a bastion of elite journalism.
But nonetheless, your ass is being beaten by those sleazy publications that you only peek at while waiting in the checkout line.
What do you do?
Well, you don’t soil your keyboard by actually digging into the tabloid story.
Oh, by the way, I’m thinking of the Tiger Woods “scandal,” in case anybody couldn’t guess.
As I say, you as an elite newspaper take the high road. Rather than doing real dirty work by reporting on numerous women who have boasted that Tiger is a notch on their ill-fitting chastity belts, you stand back and report on the fallout for poor Tiger.
Certainly, Tiger can’t say he wasn’t warned by the respectable journalistic likes of you.
You told Tiger in no uncertain terms what would happen if he didn’t do what you ordered him to do, which was make himself a target early on in a press conference in which lots of self-righteous journalists of the check-book and non-checkbook stamp could take high, middle and low shots at the champ and generally humiliate him at their hearts’ content.
The Tiger was sage enough to avoid your trap, so you taught him what happens to people who don’t play ball with the media.
By rejecting the rules you tried to force on him, he put you media types in the position of having to run anything they could get on the case, as Richard Wright so aptly depicted the reporter mentality in his novel, Native Son.
What could you do?
Morally, you are clean.
Individually, you might have refused to wield your psychological bludgeons, but what choice did you have? If the lowbrow press is covering the story, you have no choice. If you try to sidestep it, self-styled armchair press critics will send bitter epistles to the Times public editor, chastizing the newspaper for depriving its readers of choice material they are forced to read in the gutter press. And the Public Editor will then elicit forced confessions from various editors and writers, humiliating them in print. nobody would want that, so better unleash the hounds and tear into Tiger.
So what if you appear to be kowtowing to the guttersnipe journalists while having your cake and eating Tiger Woods too?
So what if the man committed no crime, despite media efforts in the beginning to insinuate he did something nefarious by bumping his car into a fire hydrant at some ungodly hour of the day when respectable journalists are hunkered down with their own paramours?
So what if he’s been hung out to dry by the leeching advertising syndicate that exploited him and his sport for years. You’re not responsible for causing people to misbehave, are you?
You’re just there to report the news, come what may.
What a wonderful “profession” you have. Really, the greatest profession:
Journalism.
