Writer Hunter S. Thompson dead at 67

[casekonly]

how about the shooting of a grenade launcher at people who were trespassing on his property? that was fuckin funny to read about....

 

he will be missed.

[casekonly]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/books/02/2...obit/index.html

 

 

(CNN) -- Journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, who unleashed the concept of "gonzo journalism" in books like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," fatally shot himself in the head Sunday at his home near Aspen, Colorado, police and his family said.

 

"On February 20, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head at his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colorado," said a statement issued by Thompson's son, Juan Thompson, to the Aspen Daily News as reported by the Denver Post.

 

"The family will shortly provide more information about memorial service and media contacts. Hunter prized his privacy, and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family."

 

A dispatcher for the Pitkin County Sheriff's Department confirmed Thompson's death.

 

Thompson, 67, was associated with the "New Journalism" movement of the 1960s, in which writers took a more novelistic and personal approach to their subjects. His account of a drug-fueled trip to cover a district attorneys' anti-drug conference as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine was the seed of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," perhaps his best-known work.

 

Subtitled "A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," the 1971 book included his lament on the passing of the 1960s and its "sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil."

 

"There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs," he wrote. "We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

 

In "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," he described the campaign leading to Richard Nixon's re-election as president with terms like "brutal" and "depraved," speculating that Democratic Sen. Ed Muskie was under the influence of an obscure African psychoactive drug and bemoaned Nixon's looming victory by proclaiming, "Jesus, where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to become president?"

 

Other works included "The Great Shark Hunt," a collection of Watergate-era essays; "Generation of Swine," his lament on the youth of the 1980s; and his account of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential win, "Better than Sex." His lone novel, "The Rum Diaries," was published in 1998, while a collection of letters, "The Proud Highway: The Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman," came out in 1997.

 

In recent years, he wrote a column for the sports network ESPN's Web site. In his most recent piece, posted February 15, he describes shooting at golf balls like skeet with a friend near his longtime home -- he called it "a fortified compound" -- outside Aspen.

 

"The general reaction here is shock and dismay, because he was such a figure in town," Aspen resident John Hoag told CNN.

 

Still, Hoag said, Thompson remained a private person. "The most news we heard from him was when a pack of dogs killed his peacock, Attila, and he broke his leg in Hawaii last year."

 

Thompson also was the model for the character of "Uncle Duke" in the "Doonesbury" comic strip. But Thompson strongly disliked the characterization, once telling an interviewer that he would set "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau on fire if the two ever met.

 

In later years, however, Thompson said he had made peace with the "Uncle Duke" portrayal.

 

"I got used to it a long time ago," he told Freezerbox magazine in 2003. "I used to be a little perturbed by it. It was a lot more personal ... It no longer bothers me."

 

In 1980, actor Bill Murray portrayed Thompson in the film "Where the Buffalo Roam." And in 1998, the film "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was released, based on Thompson's book and starring Johnny Depp as the journalist. A new film reportedly is in production based on Thompson's novel "The Rum Diaries."

 

The writer himself, Hoag said, will be missed. "There's no one in the world these days who writes the truth ... as he seems to, to me," he said. "He spoke to the world and said what people were afraid to say."

[Guest im not witty]

fuck me. thats terrible.

[Guest krie]

thread #395845 on this dude

[casekonly]

Originally posted by krie@Feb 21 2005, 08:14 AM

thread #395845 on this dude

Quoted post

 

 

he deserves them all

[cloner]

rip..goddamn =\

[saraday]

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

[deterrent]

NO, I saw some old footage of him were he talks of his death. He wanted a memorial

statue to be erected on his ranch on the shape of a fist with two thumbs. The statue

would have an internal launching mechanism that would shoot his urn into the

atmosphere and allow the ashes to rain down on the land.

 

Excellent visionary, he will be sadly missed.

 

gravestone.gif

[saraday]

Originally posted by deterrent@Feb 21 2005, 10:05 AM

NO, I saw some old footage of him were he talks of his death. He wanted a memorial

statue to be erected on his ranch on the shape of a fist with two thumbs. The statue

would have an internal launching mechanism that would shoot his earn into the

atmosphere and allow the ashes to rain down on the land.

 

Excellent visionary, he will be sadly missed.

 

gravestone.gif

Quoted post

 

i heard he was suicidal for a long time.. i duno.

[alure]

RIP ;/

[imported_dowmagik]

tell leary i said hi. too sad.

[WEAK NIGGUH]

I JUST READ HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY LIKE A WEEK AGO.

 

RIP

[fermentor666]

He'll probably punch Leary in the face, he hated the guy.

[Telo]

whoa.. sad..

[Jackson]

No good.

He made me stop being scared of hallucinogens.

RIP

[DeNocheAtacamos]

im assuming he had a terminal illness....

the man is still my hero

thank you sir

[mental invalid]

i finally heard a dedication that summed it all up:

 

at about 9:50, don imus was wrapping up his show, and he

had been talking about hunter, and he goes, "okay this

is it, this is one for ole hunter"

 

 

and he play the whole "happiness is a warm gun" and

closed the show with it...

 

everything else i came across just seems pointless...

 

 

 

 

from one of my favorites writers to another:

 

 

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2113865/

 

 

obit

Hunter Thompson

The minuteman of the Rockies.

By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005, at 10:11 AM PT

 

 

 

In early August of 1990 I went to Aspen, Colo., to cover what looked as if it would be a rather banal summit involving Margaret Thatcher and George Bush. (The meeting was to be enlivened by the announcement of the forcible annexation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, who would go on to trouble our tranquility for another 13 years.) While the banal bit was still going on, the city invited the visiting press hacks for a cocktail reception at the top of an imposing mountain. Stepping off the ski lift, I was met by immaculate specimens of young American womanhood, holding silver trays and flashing perfect dentition. What would I like? I thought a gin and tonic would meet the case. "Sir, that would be inappropriate." In what respect? "At this altitude gin would be very much more toxic than at ground level." In that case, I said, make it a double.

 

The very slight contraction of the freeze-frame smile made it plain that I was wasting my time: It was the early days of the brave new America that knew what was best for you. Spurning the chardonnay and stepping straight back onto the ski lift, I was soon back in town and then, after a short drive, making a turn opposite the Woody Creek Inn (easily spotted by the pig on its roof). And there, at the very fringe of habitation, was Owl Farm and its genial proprietor, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Once inside these well-armed precincts, I could drink and smoke and ingest any damn thing I liked. I finished a fairly long evening by doing some friendly target-practice, with laser-guided high-velocity rifles, in the company of my host. An empty bottle didn't stand any more of a chance outside than a full one would have had within. It was vertiginous, for me, to be able to move from one America to another, in point of time and also of place, so rapidly.

 

It had been in 1970 that Thompson first ran for local office in Aspen, and stood against the wave of bourgeoisification that would soon make it a place where the locals could no longer afford to live. Local police officials tried to harass him in numberless ways, only to find that they were dealing not with some hippie or freak, but with one of the charter members of the Colorado National Rifle Association. Thompson was to pursue this feud, with absolutely Corsican persistence, for many decades. If he had done nothing else, he might be remembered as a village Hampden, or a minuteman of the Rockies.

 

But, as Carey McWilliams of The Nation had recognized a long time before, Hunter was more than just a "character." His proposal to write about the Hell's Angels for the magazine, once accepted, was more than a brilliant piece of observant and participant journalism. It helped to curtain-raise the '60s, and perhaps most especially the hectic excess of that decade in California. Keen as he was on the herbivorous and antimilitarist side of that moment, Thompson wasn't at all blind to the noir aspect, and helped prepare readers for the Manson and Altamont dimension. He'd been in this mood since at least November 22, 1963, when he first employed the words "fear and loathing" to express the way he felt about whomever it was who had murdered the president.

 

"The only things I've ever been arrested for," said Hunter in one late interview, "were things I didn't do." It would take a very long article to describe all the deeds for which he could have been indicted, and all the days and nights when he could well have ended up dead. I hope that it isn't true that he became depressed and miserable about the pain and immobility of a broken leg, and that the only lethal crime he ever committed was against himself in a dark hour, but the thing seems depressingly plausible, and there would always have been a firearm, and ammo, within easy reach.

 

I'm not that crazy about the gonzo school, or any other version of the new journalism either, but Thompson's signature style was not always, or not entirely, about faxing unedited notes or having his life insurance cancelled by Jan Wenner. He was, above all, a highly polished hater, and could fuel himself as well as ignite others with his sheer contempt for Richard Nixon and all that he stood for. This involved, for some years, a life where there was almost no distance between belief and action. And it is why his 1972 book on the campaign trail holds up so well. But even then he knew, as he was to keep repeating, that "the wave" of the insurgent '60s— "a fantastic, universal sense that whatever we were doing was right: that we were winning"—was a wave that had not only "broken" but had "rolled back."

 

This was a rapture that was hard to recapture. In Wayne Ewing's oddly effective movie, Breakfast with Hunter, it is possible to detect the sensation of diminishing returns. The old enrage doesn't really look that comfortable as he is card-indexed by the historian Douglas Brinkley (who edited his collected letters, for Chrissake) or venerated as an icon by George Plimpton. He doesn't even seem all that keen on being played by Johnny Depp in the celluloid version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He's fine when hanging out with Warren Zevon, but he appears a bit lost when he's discharging fire extinguishers, or hurling blown-up fuck-dolls around the scenery, as if this sort of thing was expected of him. "He was never one to hang around when it was time to go," a mutual friend e-mailed me on Monday. The realization that this might have occurred to him before it occurred to us is a very melancholy one.

 

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to Slate. His most recent book is Love, Poverty and War. He is also the author of A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq and of Blood, Class and Empire.

[mental invalid]

jesus youre all depressing...

 

the guy was 67, he lived longer then most, and he lived harder then anyone...

 

it really shouldnt come as a suprise, you think hunter was gonna let old age take him down?

 

not a chance...

 

so lets toast rum, smoke cigarettes, do something no matter how small out of the norm, rail against injustice and reread the classics of unkie duke...

 

long live hunter!

[DITDxCULT]

Another reason why I'm proud to be from Kentucky. I've driven by Hunter S. Thompson's childhood home countless times wondering, what was it that inspired him to write the way he did? And did he really drink that much and drive around with rifles in the back of his car?

 

Rest in peace

 

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

 

This may help explain why why Dr. Hunter S. Thompson chose to take his own life.

[mental invalid]

from the new york times

 

 

February 22, 2005

AN APPRECIATION

The Thompson Style: A Sense of Self, and Outrage

By DAVID CARR

 

unter S. Thompson died on Sunday, alone with a gun in his kitchen in Woody Creek, Colo. In doing so, he added heft to a legend that came to obscure his gifts as one of journalism's most influential practitioners.

 

Somewhere beneath the cartoon - he was Uncle Duke in the Doonesbury strip, of course, but Bill Murray inked him well in the 1980 film "Where the Buffalo Roam" - and a lifestyle dominated by a long and sophisticated romance with drugs, Mr. Thompson managed to change the course of American journalism.

 

Of all of the so-called practitioners of New Journalism, Mr. Thompson was the one who was willing to insert himself and his capacious reserve of outrage into the middle of every story. In his articles for Rolling Stone and his seminal 1973 book, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" Mr. Thompson threw himself at the conventions of political reporting. Not only was he not neutral, he was angry, an avenging proxy for the American polity. Brick by brick, he tore away a wall - since rebuilt - that made politics seem like a low-stakes minstrel show.

 

"He spent his life in search of an honest man, and he seldom found any," said James Silberman, his longtime editor and publisher at Random House and Summit Books.

 

As a writer though, Mr. Thompson met plenty of honest digressions, and engaged them all to their fullest. He would begin with a premise - Richard Nixon was doing Satan's handiwork, for instance - and then in writing about it, tumble through the Tet Offensive, the drugs from the previous night he was trying to fight through, Hubert Humphrey's alleged spinelessness, Nixon's surprising knowledge of the N.F.L., and the fecklessness of his editors, before landing the entire rococo mix in one tidy package, like a gift.

 

His assignments always became quests. It was not enough for him to journey south to Cozumel off the Yucatán Peninsula to write about rich white men hunting sharks; he also had to retrieve 50 doses of MDA, a drug he was fond of, that he had stashed in the shark pool of the aquarium the last time he was on the island. Mr. Thompson managed to live and write his own version of the Heisenberg principle: That the observer not only changes events by his presence, but his presence also frequently surpasses the event in terms of importance. Like many contemporary American writers, Mr. Thompson lived the bell curve of a writer's life. Long after the "Fear and Loathing" rubric had been arrayed over everything from shark fishing, the Hell's Angels and Las Vegas, he was hounded by the fact that his moment - a white hot one where in which he found himself face to face with a shark or George McGovern - had passed.

 

His friends would continue to drop by Woody Creek, his remote, mountainous salon near Aspen for smart, engaging talk accompanied by the explosives, narcotics and weaponry Mr. Thompson counted as enduring hobbies. Ed Bradley of "60 Minutes" was one of them, and said yesterday that Thompson's menace was overestimated, that it was frequently overwhelmed by courtliness. George Plimpton was a frequent visitor, as was Walter Isaacson. Even the town sheriff was welcome, as long as he called ahead so Mr. Thompson could tidy the premises.

 

For a generation of American students, Mr. Thompson made journalism seem like a dangerous, fantastic occupation, in the process transforming an avocation that was mostly populated by doughy white men in short-sleeve white button-downs and bad ties into something fit for those who smoked Dunhills at the end of cigarette holders and wore sunglasses regardless of the time of day. It is to his credit or blame that many aspiring journalists showed up to cover their first, second, and sometimes third local city council meetings in bowling shirts and bad sunglasses (no names need be mentioned here), along with their notebooks.

 

For all of the pharmacological foundations of his stories, Mr. Thompson was a reporter, taking to the task of finding out what other people knew with an avidity that earned the respect of even those who found his personal hobbies reprehensible. Hunter S. Thompson knew stuff and wrote about it in a way that could leave his colleagues breathless and vowing to do better.

 

He had a gift for sentence writing, and he tended to write a lot of them. But his loquaciousness was not restricted to articles and books. In "Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist," his memoir published in 2000 which was composed of correspondence, it became clear how in his hands even the lowly expense report, usually a relentlessly banal document, could be a thing of beauty.

 

To Mr. Thompson, it was all true, every word of it. Maybe not literally, you-can-look-it-up true, but true in a way that the bean counters would never understand. Friends say that he appeared to be relatively happy of late, and was fully engaged in the writing projects he had before him. But a chronic series of physical infirmities - he had to use a wheelchair at times - left him feeling that he was finally being maneuvered by forces he could not medicate or write into obscurity.

 

And his suicide had its own terrible logic. A man who was so intent on generating a remarkable voice that he retyped Hemingway's novels just to understand how it was done, gave a final bit of dramatic tribute in turning a gun on himself.

[26SidedCube]

Quit now. You all suck at life.

[Smart]

Fuck you 26.

You just made the list.

[mental invalid]

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story...hunter/steadman

 

ESPN.com: Page 2

 

Friday, February 25, 2005

Farewell, Hunter

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Page 2

 

Long-time friend Ralph Steadman is the satirical cartoonist who illustrated several of Hunter S. Thompson's books, including "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." This remembrance originally appeared in the British newspaper The Independent earlier this week.

 

 

"I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time," he told me many years ago, and I knew he meant it. It wasn't a case of if but when. He didn't reckon he would make it beyond 30, anyway, so he lived it all in the fast lane. There were no first, second, third and top gears in a car -- just overdrive. He was in a hurry. Drive your stake into a darkened heart in a red Mercedes Benz. The blackness hides a speeding tramp. The savage beast pretends. But never mind the nights, my love, because they never really happened anyway. So we wrote in a Beverly Hills house one drunken night. I wrote the stanzas -- he wrote the chorus. Don't write, Ralph, he said. You'll bring shame on your family.

 

 

 

"Those Weird and Twisted Nights." That was the song.

 

 

Yesterday morning, Sunday, I had just finished signing the 1,200 limitation pages for a Taschen version of "The Curse of LONO," which Hunter had signed so uncharacteristically -- obedient and mechanical, over the month of December. I thought that was very strange. He has to be cajoled like a child to do anything like that, so I drew his portrait across the last sheet, glaring out, his two eyes in the two O's of LONO, put the cigarette holder with the long Dunhill prodding upwards in his grimacing mouth, signed it with and extra flourish and closed the last of the four boxes. The old bastard! He waited to make sure I had finished the task, then he signed himself off. I knew it was too good to be true. Now I will be expected the build the monstrous cannon in Woody Creek, a hundred-foot-high column of steel tubes, with the big red fist on its top and his ashes placed in a fire bomb in its palm. Two thumbs, Ralph! Don't forget the two thumbs!!

 

 

It was the Gonzo fist and he really believes I can do it! Such were his demands as he tipped at his windmills. People were f------ with his beloved Constitution, and he was born to banish the geeks who were doing it. In that way, he was a real live American. A pioneer, frontiersman, last of the cowboys, even a conservative redneck with a huge and raging mind, taking the easy way out and mythologizing himself at the same time.

 

 

He spent a lot of his early years of rejection writing, verbatim, excerpts from Hemingway, Faulkner and Conrad, trying to imagine what it was like to write some classic text. He could be very persuasive. As a boy, he was hired by the milkman to collect outstanding bills from the citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, but he was shunned by his neighbours and, especially, the literary establishment in the town, so he had a score to settle.

 

 

I had only just arrived in America in late April of 1970, and was staying with a friend in the Hamptons to decompress. I got a call from JC Suares, art editor of Scanlan's magazine in New York. He said, "How'd ya like to go to the Kentucky Derby with an ex-Hell's Angel who just shaved his head and cover the race? His name is Hunter S. Thompson and he wants an artist to nail the decadent, depraved faces of the local establishment who meet there. He doesn't want a photographer. He wants something weird and we've seen your work."

 

 

 

Ralph Steadman and Hunter Thompson were made for each other.

The editor, Don Goddard, had been the New York Times foreign editor and he thought I was naïve enough to take this on. I was looking for work -- so I went. Finding Hunter � or, indeed, anyone covering the prestigious Kentucky Derby who is not a bona fide registered journalist, was no easy matter; and trying to explain my reasons for being there was even worse, especially as I was under the impression that this was an official trip and I was an accredited press man. Why shouldn't I think that? I assumed that Scanlan's was an established magazine.

 

 

I had been watching someone chalk racing results on a blackboard while I sipped a beer, and I was about to turn and get myself another when a voice like no other I had ever heard cut into my thoughts and sank its teeth into my brain. It was a cross between a slurred Karate chop and gritty molasses.

 

 

"Um . . . er you . . . er . . . wouldn't be from England . . . er . . . would you . . . er . . . an artist . . . maybe . . . er . . . what the!!"

 

 

I had turned around and two fierce eyes, firmly socketed inside a bullet-shaped head, were staring at a strange growth I was nurturing on the end of my chin. "Holy s---!" he exclaimed. "They said I was looking for a matted-haired geek with string warts and I guess I've found him."

 

 

We took a beer together and sat in the press box. Somehow, he had got our accreditation and we were in. He asked me if I gambled and I said, only once in 1952. I put two shillings on Early Mist to win in our Derby, and I did. I picked a horse but didn't bet and it won, so then I picked another, backed it with a dollar, and lost. "That's why I don't gamble," I said.

 

 

"I thought you had been picked up," he replied.

 

 

"Picked up??" I didn't quite understand.

 

 

"Er . . . yes. The police here are pretty keen. They tend to take an interest in something different. The . . . er . . . um . . . the beard. Not many of them around these parts. Not these days, anyway."

 

 

I was beginning to take in the whole of the man's appearance, and his was a little different, too. Certainly not what I was expecting. No time-worn leather, shining with old sump oil. No manic tattoo across a bare upper arm, and strangely no hint of menace. This man had an impressive head chiselled from one piece of bone, and the top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy-brimmed sun hat. His top half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multi-coloured patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants, and the whole torso was pivoted on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the bulkheads. Damn near 6-foot-6 of solid bone and meat holding a beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between the arthritic fingers of his other hand.

 

 

Arthritis was to plague him all his life, as was the football knee injury which left him with one leg shorter than the other. But it never truly encumbered his physical rage or his action-packed approach to a deep respect and love of writing -- and righteousness.

 

 

We found the decadent, depraved faces of Louisville by the end of the first week we spent together. They were staring at us from a mirror in the gent's toilet on the infield, where the rest of the riffraff, who are not eligible to stand in the privileged boxes of the chosen few, spent their time at the races, just like us.

 

 

We spent many assignments together, bucking the trend, against the cheats and liars, the bagmen and the cronies � me, an alien from the old country; and him raging against the coming of the light. "F--- them, Ralph," he would say. "We are not like the others."

 

 

Well, he wasn't anyway, but I was easily led. Before "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" we tried to cover the America's Yacht Race in Rhode Island for Scanlan's (who were just about to go bust and get onto Richard Nixon's blacklist), from a three-masted schooner, a rock band on board for distraction, booze and, for Hunter, whatever he was gobbling at the time. I was seasick and Hunter was fine. I asked him what he was taking and he gave me one. It was psilocybin, a psychedelic hallucinogen, my first and only drug trip apart from Librium.

 

 

I was the artist from England, so I had a job to do. He handed me two spray paint canisters.

 

 

"What do I do with these?"

 

 

"You're the artist, Ralph. Do what you want, but you must do it on the side of one of those multi-million dollar yachts, moored hardly 50 yards away from where we are."

 

 

"How about F--- THE POPE?" I said, now seeing in my mind red snarling dogs attacking a musician singing at a piano dressed as a nun at a shore-bound bar.

 

 

"Are you a Catholic, Ralph??"

 

 

"No," I replied. "It's just the first thing that came to mind."

 

 

So that was the plan and we made it to the boats and I stood up in the little dinghy with the spray cans and shook them, as one does. They made a clicking sound and alerted a guard. "We must flee, Ralph! There'll be pigs everywhere. We have failed."

 

 

He pulled fiercely on the oars and fell backwards with legs in the air. He righted himself and started rowing again. We made it back to our boat; and then while I was gabbling insanely, he was writing down all the gibberish that I uttered. I was now a basket case and we had to get back to shore and flee. Hunter shot off two Leery distress flares into the harbour and we hailed a boat just coming in. The flares set fire to one of the boats, causing an emergency fire rescue as we got to dry land.

 

 

There's more and I won't go on, but I guess that was the genesis of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

 

 

Such a wild game was possible, but it needed all the genius and application of Hunter S. Thompson to make it live. He has done that and he has proved that a redneck Southern gentleman who has the fire in his belly and the indignation in his soul can make it happen. I had the good fortune to meet one of the great originals of American Literature. Maybe he is the Mark Twain of the late 20th Century. Time will sort the bastard out. I have always known that one day I would know this journey; but yesterday, I did not know that it would be today . . .

 

 

I leave it to others more qualified than me to assess and appraise his monumental literary legacy.

[villain]

Here's a good article on Gonzo and Rather, their influence on media in the past and a comparison with the state of media today.

I also had no idea that Dan Rather committed suicide a week after Thompson did. RIP

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/arts/06r...ml?pagewanted=1

[fermentor666]

Could you post the article? I'm not registered at NYT.

 

And Dan Rather is dead?

[villain]

Originally posted by fermentor666@Mar 7 2005, 09:50 PM

Could you post the article? I'm not registered at NYT.

 

And Dan Rather is dead?

Quoted post

 

Yeah sorry... I don't know why those damn right wing bloggers gave Dan Rather such a hard time. In his old age he was just a news reader, not an investigative reporter. So it really wasn't his story in the first place. What a bunch of crap. Liberals need to revoke the license of right wing bloggers.

 

 

 

 

Gonzo Gone, Rather Going, Watergate Still Here

 

Published: March 6, 2005

 

TWO weeks ago Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide. Next week Dan Rather commits ritual suicide, leaving the anchor chair at CBS prematurely as penance for his toxic National Guard story. The two journalists shared little but an abiding distaste - make that hatred in Thompson's case - for the Great Satan of 20th-century American politics, Richard Nixon. The best work of both was long behind them. Yet memories of that best work - not to mention the coincidental timing of their departures - only accentuate the vacuum in that cultural category we stubbornly insist on calling News.

 

What's missing from News is the news. On ABC, Peter Jennings devotes two hours of prime time to playing peek-a-boo with U.F.O. fanatics, a whorish stunt crafted to deliver ratings, not information. On NBC, Brian Williams is busy as all get-out, as every promo reminds us, "Reporting America's Story." That story just happens to be the relentless branding of Brian Williams as America's anchorman - a guy just too in love with Folks Like Us to waste his time looking closely at, say, anything happening in Washington.

 

In this environment, it's hard to know whom to root for. After the "60 Minutes" fiasco, Mr. Williams's boss, the NBC president Jeff Zucker, piously derided CBS for its screw-up, bragging of the reforms NBC News instituted after a producer staged a truck explosion for a "Dateline NBC" segment in 1992. "Nothing like that could have gotten through, at any level," Mr. Zucker said of the CBS National Guard story, "because of the safeguards we instituted more than a decade ago." Good for him, but it's not as if a lot else has gotten through either. When was the last time Stone Phillips delivered a scoop, with real or even fake documents, on "Dateline"? Or that NBC News pulled off an investigative coup as stunning as the "60 Minutes II" report on Abu Ghraib? That, poignantly enough, was Mr. Rather's last hurrah before he, too, and through every fault of his own, became a neutered newsman.

 

Hunter Thompson did not do investigative reporting, but he would have had a savage take on our news-free world - not least because it resembles his own during the Nixon era, before he had calcified into the self-parodistic pop culture cartoon immortalized by Garry Trudeau, Bill Murray, Johnny Depp and most of his eulogists. Read "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" - the chronicle of his Rolling Stone election coverage - and you find that his diagnosis of journalistic dysfunction hasn't aged a day: "The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists." He cites as a classic example the breathless but belated revelations of the mental history of George McGovern's putative running mate, the Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton - a story that had long been known by "half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps." This same clubby pack would be even tardier on Watergate, a distasteful assignment left to a pair of lowly police-beat hacks at The Washington Post.

 

Thompson was out to break the mainstream media's rules. His unruly mix of fact, opinion and masturbatory self-regard may have made him a blogger before there was an Internet, but he was a blogger who had the zeal to leave home and report firsthand and who could write great sentences that made you want to savor what he found out rather than just scroll quickly through screen after screen of minutiae and rant. When almost all "the Wizards, Gurus and Gentlemen Journalists in Washington" were predicting an unimpeded victory march for Edmund Muskie to the Democratic presidential nomination, it was Thompson who sniffed out the Muskie campaign's "smell of death" and made it stick. The purported front-runner, he wrote, "talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year's crop."

 

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But even Thompson might have been shocked by what's going on now. "The death of Thompson represents the passing from the Age of Gonzo to the Age of Gannon," wrote Russell Cobb in a column in The Daily Texan at the University of Texas. As he argues, today's White House press corps is less likely to be invaded by maverick talents like a drug-addled reporter from a renegade start-up magazine than by a paid propagandist like Jeff Gannon, a fake reporter for a fake news organization (Talon News) run by a bona fide Texas Republican operative who was a delegate to the 2000 Bush convention.

 

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Though a few remain on the case - Eric Boehlert of Salon, mediamatters.org, Joe Strupp of Editor and Publisher - the Gannon story is fast receding. In some major news venues, including ABC and CBS, it never surfaced at all. Yet even as Mr. Gannon has quit his "job" as a reporter and his "news organization" has closed up shop, the plot thickens. His own Web site - which only recently shut down with the self-martyring message "The voice goes silent" - has now restarted as a blog with Gonzo pretensions. The title alone of his first entry, "Fear and Loathing in the Press Room," would send Thompson spinning in his grave had he not asked that his remains be shot out of a cannon.

 

As a blogger, Mr. Gannon's new tactic is to encourage fellow right-wing bloggers to portray him as the victim of a homophobic left-wing witch hunt that destroyed his privacy. Given that it was Mr. Gannon himself who voluntarily exhibited his own private life by appearing on Web sites advertising his services as a $200-per-hour escort, that's a hard case to make. But it is a clever way to deflect attention from an actual sexual witch hunt conducted by his own fake news organization in early 2004. It was none other than Talon News that advanced the fictional story that a young woman "taped an interview with one of the major television networks" substantiating a rumor on the Drudge Report that John F. Kerry had had an extramarital affair with an intern. (Mr. Kerry had to publicly deny the story just as his campaign came out of the gate.) This is the kind of dirty trick only G. Gordon Liddy could dream up. Or maybe did. Mr. Gannon's Texan boss, Bobby Eberle, posted effusive thanks (for "their assistance, guidance and friendship") to both Mr. Liddy and Karl Rove on Talon News's sister site, GOPUSA, last Christmas.

 

Mr. Gannon, a self-promoting airhead, may well be a pawn of larger forces as the vainglorious Mr. Liddy once was. But to what end? That Kerry "intern" wasn't the only "news" Mr. Gannon helped stuff in the pipeline during an election year. A close reading of the transcripts of televised White House press conferences reveals that at uncannily crucial moments he was called on by the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, to stanch tough questioning on such topics as Abu Ghraib and Mr. Rove's possible involvement in the outing of the C.I.A. spy Valerie Plame. We still don't know how this Zelig, using a false name, was given a daily White House pass every day for two years. Last weekend, Jim Pinkerton, a former official in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses, said on "Fox News Watch," no less, that such a feat "takes an incredible amount of intervention from somebody high up in the White House," that it had to be "conscious" and that "some investigation should proceed and they should find that out."

 

Given an all-Republican government, the only investigation possible will have to come from the press. Which takes us back to 1972, the year of Thompson's fear and loathing on the campaign trail. That was no golden age for news either. As Thompson's Rolling Stone colleague, Timothy Crouse, wrote in his own chronicle of that year, "The Boys on the Bus," months of stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein failed to "sink in" and only 48 percent of those polled by Gallup had heard of Watergate by Election Day.

 

Some news organizations had simply ignored The Post's scoops "out of petty rivalry," wrote Mr. Crouse. Others did so because they "feared the administration or favored Nixon in the presidential race." Others didn't initially recognize the story's importance. (The New York Times played the Watergate break-in on page 30.) The White House's pathological secrecy and penchant for threatening to use the Federal Communications Commission as a battering ram on its broadcast critics took care of the rest. According to a superb new history of the Washington press corps, "Reporting from Washington," by Donald A. Ritchie, even Mr. Rather, then CBS's combative man in the Nixon White House, "left the Watergate story alone at first, sure that it would fade like 'a puff of talcum powder.' "

 

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For similar if not identical reasons, journalistic investigations into the current administration rarely "sink in" either. Early stories in The Boston Globe and Washington Post on what Jeff Gannon himself (on his blog) now calls "Gannongate" faded like that puff of powder. So did Eric Lichtblau's recent Times report on the White House's suppression of the 9/11 commission finding that federal aviation officials ignored dozens of advance warnings of Al Qaeda airline hijackings and suicide missions. But we've now entered a new twilight zone: in 1972, at least, the press may have been stacked with jokers but not with counterfeit newsmen.

 

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Today you can't tell the phonies without a scorecard. Besides the six "journalists" we know to have been paid by the administration or its backers, bloggers were on the campaign payrolls of both a Republican office-seeker (South Dakota's Senator John Thune) and a Democrat (Howard Dean) during last year's campaign. This week The Los Angeles Times reported that Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration, "taking a cue from President Bush's administration," had distributed fake news videos starring a former TV reporter to extol the governor's slant on a legislative proposal. Back in Washington, the Social Security Administration is refusing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests for information about its use of public relations firms - such as those that funneled taxpayers' money to the likes of Armstrong Williams. Don't expect news organizations dedicated to easy-listening news to get to the bottom of it.

 

"Reporting America's Story," NBC's slogan, is what Hunter Thompson actually did before the phrase was downsized into a vacuous marketing strategy. As for Mr. Rather, he gave a valedictory interview to Ken Auletta of The New Yorker in which he said, "The one thing I hope, and I believe, is that even my enemies think that I am authentic." The bar is so low these days that authenticity may well constitute a major journalistic accomplishment in itself.