The rogue reporter

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

"I can't advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity for everyone...but they've always worked for me."
--Hunter S. Thompson

I didn't go into journalism to find the next Watergate. I had no desire to ferret out corruption or camp out in a CEO's office for some gotcha journalism.

I wanted to tell stories.

Hunter Thompson told stories, and that's the simplest way I can put it. But he didn't chronicle life around him, not like many other journalists. He told stories where he was the main character, the kind journalists tell in a thousand bars across America after they've filed or the paper was put to bed.

But the outsized stories Hunter Thompson told made him a character,so cartoonish that he became a comic strip character, Uncle Duke in "Doonesbury."

Hunter Thompson killed himself last week. He was, according to reports, in physical pain and his writing indicates he was none too thrilled at the prospect of four more years of Dubya.

Thompson was one of the foremost practitioners of what was called "New Journalism," a style of writing that provided more atmosphere and description than the standard style of journalistic writing.

From Tom Wolfe to Gay Talese, young newspapermen in New York City were taking aspects of literature and using them to write news stories.

But Hunter Thompson was something else. He ingested mass quantities of controlled substances (for God's sake, the man began probably his most famous work, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" thus: We were somewhere around Barstow when the drugs began to take hold) and told stories that were rippingly funny.

In some instances, he told stories about ingesting controlled substances (The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved). He was a writer like none the world had ever seen, and none the world will see again. They won't let it.

The problem with Thompson's writing is that everyone wants to try it, and most people aren't that good. Also, in a news business that values quarterly profits above all else, everyone suddenly wants to err on the side of caution.

And in the end, he had outlived his time, a relic of the "You had to be there" era of the 1960s, with riots in the streets, Hell's Angels, recreational drug use and fear and loathing.

I'm one of probably a legion of journalism students who had to read his work at some point in their educational career. He was also a fun guy to read for shits and giggles, and probably better taken that way.

I'm not sure what type of lesson I or any other journalist would take from Hunter Thompson.

He'll probably be required reading for years to come, but as a cautionary tale. Much like journalism students now read 100-year-old news stories and marvel at the purple prose (ever actually read Grantland Rice's story about the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame?), students might have to do that someday with Hunter Thompson.

In "The Great Shark Hunt," he railed against journalism professors, saying they demonstrated fully George Bernard Shaw's aphorism that who can, do; who can't teach.

It appears journalism professors might have the last laugh. They can't teach people to be like him; nobody could. So the best they'll do is teach people to not be like him.