Jimmy Breslin died over the weekend. \u00a0He was 88.<\/p>\n
We’ll come back to that.<\/p>\n
The media today – or at least, people of a certain age (i.e. older than me) who are still in the media – remind me of circus performers telling inside jokes about what the ringmaster did after that one show in Lincoln, or of mailmen amongst themselves about the worst breeds of dog to encounter, or \u00a0city bus drivers reminiscing about the foibles of that old model of bus that got retired a couple of decades ago, unlamented by anyone but, well, them. \u00a0They remind me of any group of clubby, beleaguered insiders who turn the foibles, peccadillos and petty miseries of their callings into legends in their own minds. \u00a0 \u00a0Not like World War II veterans telling niche anecdotes from a little tiny window of the fight to save freedom. \u00a0Just guys who did something most people don’t care\u00a0about all that much, building it in their minds into something worthy of the life they built around it.<\/p>\n
Unlike arthritic old circus hands, mailmen and bus drivers, journalists buy newsprint by the rail car and ink by the barrel – so they can inflict their particular tales, traditions and argot onto the rest us. \u00a0And lest anyone accuse me of ridiculing other people, I am one of them, at least as regards the radio industry.<\/p>\n
I remember hearing some longtime Twin Cities journalists talk about Nick Coleman leaving the Star\/Tribune. \u00a0“He was a great, old-time newspaperman”, one of them said. \u00a0“One of the best”.<\/p>\n
Why, I asked.<\/p>\n
What followed was an explanation I can’t possibly reproduce here – but it boiled down to Coleman epitomizing what an old-school “ink-stained wretch” was supposed to look, act and write like.<\/p>\n
And I thought “this is the Nick Coleman who made an outsized contribution to the decline and fall of journalism. \u00a0If he didn’t like you, he’d just make s**t up; he’d conjure up community groups from his imagination<\/a>, \u00a0or make up facts<\/a> when he didn’t know enough to dig, ask or wait for the real ones. \u00a0And he played a bigger-than-average role in the financial ruination<\/a> of the field he, and the journos who reminisce about him, try to earn a living in.<\/p>\n But no matter. \u00a0Journalists are like those hold each other to a standard that only they understand, and really only makes sense, or matters, really, to them.<\/p>\n And so Nick Coleman is a hero, while journalists who actually do what journalists are\u00a0supposed\u00a0<\/em>to do but don’t know the secret handshake get mocked and derided by the bus drivers. \u00a0Er, circus geeks<\/a>.<\/p>\n Damn. \u00a0I mean journos.<\/p>\n Along those lines, Journos like to tells themselves their mission nis to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.<\/p>\n It’s pretty inevitably b******t. \u00a0Most reporters spend their careers covering city council meetings and one-car crashes and writing obits and, today, probably selling ads to help their outlet get by. \u00a0 Their biases are irrelevant, because their beats are all about the mundanities of civic and public life that are just too boring for partisanship.<\/p>\n
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