“When the going gets weird, the weird go pro.”

Damn, I miss Hunter….

Because if you were as smart as you thought you were, years ago, when
you grabbed that sheepskin, it would have “EE” written across its top.
You would have really been an engineer. Or a pharmaceutical salesman. Or
an organ grinder. Something that isn’t dependent on advertising revenue.”

We could do this all day, you know. Favorite person to quote.

We also tend to forget that, before he went all Gonzo on us, he was a fantastic pure journalist, something I comment on in a piece I did for Editor & Publisher after his death.

The thing I’ll remember him most for, though, was how he really put the screws to “objective journalism,” being the first figure of any stature to point out that the rules of professional journalism as we have come to know it were subject to severe abuse. By the time he got around to Better Than Sex, Hunter’s best days were well behind him, and the book is a shadow of his greatest work. But as it was about to go to press, Nixon died, and it seemed essential that he address the passing of his great nemesis.

In that epilogue Hunter cracks off one of the most important bits of journalism criticism in the past couple of decades:

Some people will say that words like “scum” and “rotten” are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

He was absolutely right, as was so often the case.