At four in the morning, on the two-thousand-five-hundred-and-thirty-ninth installment of a program a man conducts from a room that smells, one gathers, of leather and testosterone and the residue of things smoked, Joe Rogan and three companions stumbled onto the Ives-Henry murders and the Mena affair and did, in the fumbling dark, something the Republic pays professionals handsomely not to do. They noticed. They wondered aloud. They declined the first explanation. I listened to the whole four hours in Baltimore with the ashtray full beside me, and I am obliged to report that it was journalism.
Now this is a hard sentence for a man of my vintage to write, and I want it understood that I write it without pleasure and without irony, which for me is very nearly the same as writing it in blood. I spent forty years in newsrooms that believed themselves temples, staffed by acolytes who had taken vows, and the vows were real enough — sobriety at the desk, six hundred words by six o'clock, the fact checked twice and the adjective checked thrice. But the discipline, I have come to suspect, was always half liturgy. It was the vestments the trade wore so that the public would not notice that underneath the cassock the priest was a man who had gotten a tip from a drunk in a bar and run with it. The Ives and Henry boys — two teenagers laid across the tracks in Arkansas so a locomotive might do the editing that a scalpel had begun — were not discovered by the temple.
They were rediscovered, decades late, by four men who could not have passed a j-school entrance examination and who did not need to, because the entrance examination was never a test of curiosity. It was a test of manners.
Consider the mechanism, for it is the whole American story compressed to a single ugly gear. The State commits the crime. The State investigates the crime. The State, having interviewed itself and found itself charming, declares that there was no crime. And then thirty years pass, and the coroner's real work — the work the coroner refused — falls to whoever happens to be awake and unafraid and insufficiently credentialed to know he is not allowed.
In an earlier Republic that man was a reporter with cheap shoes and a grudge. Today he wears headphones and has a Spotify contract, and the grudge, I note with some tenderness, is exactly the same grudge. Democracy has never once functioned through its institutions. It functions through its gossips.
So I concede the point. I concede it fully. The discovery was genuine and the machine that was supposed to make the discovery had rusted shut generations ago.
And here is where I must turn on my own concession, because a concession that is not examined is merely a surrender in a nicer coat. The discovery is genuine; the discipline is not merely half pretense; the missing half was the half that mattered. To stumble on a corpse at four in the morning is one thing. To know what a corpse can and cannot tell you, to resist the gravitational pull of the theory that flatters your prejudices, to file the six hundred words that stop precisely where the evidence stops — that is the labor the temple actually performed, when it performed at all, and it is the labor the four-hour tape declines by its very nature.
For the tape is a river and the column is a dam. The river carries everything downstream — the true and the false and the merely thrilling — and asks the listener to do the sorting that the writer used to do before publication. That is not a small transfer of burden; it is the whole burden, handed to the least equipped party in the transaction. When I wrote of the Scopes carnival I gave my readers a verdict they could quarrel with, but I gave them a verdict, a thing shaped, a thing that had cost me something to shape and could therefore be held against me. The boys in the studio give you the raw ore and call the smelting your problem.
They have democratized discovery, which is admirable, and abolished judgment, which is not — and a discovery without judgment is a locomotive without a track, all that magnificent momentum going precisely nowhere, or worse, going everywhere at once, which in a Republic already drunk on its own suspicions is the more dangerous condition by far.
So take the comic over the credentialed man, yes — I have said it and I stand on it. But take him for his instinct, not his industry. The instinct was always the honest part. The discipline was the price of being trusted with it.
