Jimmy Olsen's Blues

Yours was not, in the beginning, a criminal nature, but circumstances changed it. At the age of nine, you stole sugar. At the age of fifteen, you stole money. At twenty, you stole horses. At twenty-five, you committed arson. At thirty, hardened in crime, you became an editor. . . .

Mark Twain
Lionising Murderers

Only three types of people are entitled to speak of themselves in the majestic plural: ‘We’ are European royalty, editors of newspapers and magazines, and the fellow with a turd in his pocket.

Author Unknown

I first encountered editors at journalism school. I soon learned to distrust nearly all of them.

Some editors are ignorant: The woman who then taught 'magazine writing' was allegedly a magazine editor of long experience. She kicked a short story back at me. Her comment read: "This is fiction! Journalists don't write fiction!"

Some editors are ignorant and illiterate: The first item I wrote for a newspaper argued that "This or that event (Something to do with the local school board, I forget just what.) is doubly ironic," and went on to explain precisely why. An assistant editor who was paid staff, not a student, changed the lead sentence to "This or that event redoubles with irony."

Some editors are ignorant, illiterate, and stupid: Working as a technical writer, I had an editor blow up on me when I used the word 'bore' (as in 'bore a hole in sheet metal') in my first draft of a technical manual. "Yew cain't use thet werd aroun’ here!" she drooled: "H'it soun’s lahk a piiig."

Take just one such yahoo off the copy desk and boot her or him up, into a management position, the results are entirely predictable. To misquote Mr. John Knightley: “Pride of position, working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.”

I believe that is what leads some editors to lie to their readers: I know at least one who writes and publishes laudatory reviews of books he hasn't read, some of which just happen to have been written by one or another of his personal friends and colleagues, editors all, who do the same for him on occasion. They regard lying to readers as a form of professional courtesy.

Some editors lie to everyone about everything: Years ago, I submitted an op-ed piece to an online news site. In a ham-handed and idiotic attempt to localize the article, the editor rewrote it to make it read like a news report from Los Angeles. Compounding his abuse, he left my byline on the butchered item as if I had actually written the lies that his own perversity created and published. When I jumped him for his crimes, he tried to bullshit me: “You’re being silly! Everyone does stuff like that.” Had he been where I could reach him, I’d have fattened his lip at that point.

Everyone who writes for money encounters such horrors on occasion. Many writers, more experienced or less fortunate than I, can tell tales much more terrible. Speaking strictly of newspaper and magazine journalism it is safe to say that for every competent editor in the profession there are a hundred as bad or worse than those I’ve cried about here. Where they come from and how they get behind a desk are more than I can fathom, but their presence in journalism does the profession no good whatever.

Never having worked with book publishers, my love of books and literature led me to fancy that book editors were of a higher caliber than those encountered by lowlife scribblers like me. Then I happened on a copy of Arthur Plotnik’s Spunk and Bite: A writer’s guide to punchier, more engaging language & style. The first paragraph of Chapter Two reads:

Readers love surprise. They love it when a sentence heads one way and jerks another. They love the boing of a jack-in-the-box word. They adore images that trot by like a unicorn in pajamas.

I don’t know if Mr. Plotnik wrote that of his own volition or if his editor made him write it. The question is irrelevant because, either way, it had to pass an editor’s scrutiny. Thus my faith in book editors is shattered. My faith in Strunk & White is restored.

The editor who writes those phony book reviews erupted in anger when I caught him out and told him he ought to stop. He told me I was stupid and naive, that if I knew anything about journalism I would know that bogus book reviews are a common sin. I had little to say back to him because I myself – then being a new writer, down and out, uncertain of my abilities and overeager for a break – once allowed an author by whose talent and fame I was awed to suggest changes in my review of his (then) latest book. It was a mistake I have never since repeated and one of which I am deeply ashamed.

Today I avoid pangs of conscience and the loss of friends by refusing to review any book written by anyone with whom I am personally acquainted. I do not solicit review copies from publishers. Books I review today are books that I buy, borrow, steal, find in an outhouse or acquire as gifts. I don’t sell advertising and nobody pays me to write, so all of my reviews – whatever their aesthetic merit – derive some virtue from the fact that my opinions are beholden to no one.

Our online community makes much of the idea that we are not like so-called ‘mainstream’ media. To the extent that it’s true, I celebrate our difference from the mainstream as a good thing. After all, mainstream media are presently in a shambles: American newspapermen, having forsaken their fiduciary obligations to the United States Constitution, to American democracy, and to the American people at large, now busy themselves closing newspapers, laying off help, downsizing, merging, and looking for jobs in other professions. Book publishers are in similar straits. Broadcast news, for so many years a rude and stupid joke, still clownishly proclaims the quality of its journalism while it airs nothing weightier than corporate press releases, government propaganda and ‘infotainers’ such as Katie Couric, Limbaugh, Olbermann, O’Reilly and others.

The decline and debasement of mainstream journalism draws a lot of attention. The Powers That Be throw mass quantities of money, brains, ink, and statistical expertise at what they say is an effort to identify what’s going on. Power says it wants to know what has changed, what drives the public to abandon mainstream mainstays such as The New York Times and The CBS Evening News and why the public does so.

My own, nonprofessional surmise is that corporate hacks who serve Power already know the answers to those questions. What the hacks actually worry about is that, as readers desert the mainstream, as the old media circus folds, advertising flees the old venues to seek new homes in Cyberspace. What the hacks truly want to know, therefore, is how to exploit and control the Internet in ways that allow them to regain the ad revenue they have lost and thereby remain useful to Power.

We in the Blogosphere still, for the most part, write our own content and edit our own work. Our pages are infinitely large and we don’t depend on advertisers, so we don’t subject ourselves to the whims and the dictates of corrupt and cretinous word cops. This is not to say the Blogosphere has no use for editors, but only that good editors are mighty hard to come by and there are far too many of the other sort.

Most bloggers are glad to see ad money coming to the Web at last. I wonder how many understand that advertising and censorship are Siamese twins. When the whip comes down, we will be different from the mainstream or we will not. Where we are headed is a shot I cannot now call, but I do remember it was Cyndi Lauper who sang Money Changes Everything.

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