"New Journalism" and Present Day News Media

In class, we briefly talked about the significance of Henry David Thoreau’s use of the first person in Walden. This expanded into a discussion about the changes in how both societies and individuals have thought about the “I,” as well as the consequences of these changes.

Something that came to mind when thinking about this topic was the movement of “New Journalism” that started in the ‘60s and ‘70s with authors like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. These authors brought individuality to journalism that has fascinating ramifications not only in the context of the development of the “I,” but also in how news media is created and digested in the present day.

“New Journalism,” as a movement, essentially entails the placement of the journalist inside the narrative that they are reporting on. Even within the genre, different authors take vastly different approaches to the concept of “news.” Thom Wolfe, in books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, includes interactions with himself and the people which he writes about but is more of an observer than a participant in the action. On the other hand, Hunter S. Thompson, in books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, throws himself in the center of the plot, sacrificing almost everything that made conventional journalism “journalism” while doing so.

However, the threads that weave themselves through the “New Journalism” movement as a whole are worth exploring for this class. Perhaps the most relevant of these characteristics is one that goes hand in hand with the introduction of the first person in literature: subjectivity. Classical journalists solicited the reader’s trust by reporting as an objective third party, giving their audience only the facts, allowing them to come to their own conclusions. New journalists, on the other hand, tended to create stories that they saw to be “truthful rather than factual.”¹ This distinction between truth and fact is one that has exasperating consequences for the modern American.

As a fringe movement, “New Journalism” worked well. They could offer a more nuanced perspective on controversial issues in stories which often accomplished great feats as works of literature, let alone pieces of journalism. In many cases, they were successful in arguing that the truth can be more important than the facts, and their stories provided insight into an aspect of American life in a way that conventional journalism could not. However, Hunter S. Thompson in no way dismantled the credibility of the entire news industry. Although Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail may have been an entertaining and perhaps insightful read, people still trusted the mainstream media to provide them with accurate, daily coverage of the president. 

            If the “New Journalism” movement is to be posited as a precursor to the state of the news media today, this is the most important distinction. Although Hunter S. Thompson may have relied on “alternative facts” to get his point across, he was not offering these facts up every day on Twitter as a source of news. One could imagine Thompson writing a novel about a politician running a child-sex ring out of the back of a pizza shop, but it would be hard to imagine people taking the story as seriously as they did.

In short, a piece of information can only be false if there is a conflicting piece of information which is deemed as true. The demolition of the credibility of mainstream news in the eyes of so many Americans has created a culture in which fake news cannot be accepted as fake because nothing is accepted as universally true. The failure of objectivity to survive through the digital age renders the elevation of truth over fact to be useless because neither can be shown to mean anything anymore.

¹Arlen, Michael J. "Notes on the New Journalism." The Atlantic (1972). The Atlantic. Web.