GAY TALESE ON THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM:

H&E*: Journalism today with technology and emails. I wanted to get your perspective how you perceive it? Blogs? All that stuff. 

I believe number one journalists today are so far better educated than when I was starting off at the age of 22, 23. At the age of 23, I got a job as a reporter in the sports department. I worked as a reporter at a daily paper, The Times, for almost ten years. Most of the younger people, with me, as junior reporters were the first of our generation to go to college. We were Jews, or Italians like me, or Irish. And we were really the underclass in those days. Mid 1950’s. And we saw the world differently. We were seeing power, or beauty, or privilege and writing about it, not with any great sense of anger, but certainly with a sense that “we” are not “they”. They are they, and we are whoever we are.

We as a group, the young people, did not got to major colleges. I mean Alabama, but we did not go to Harvard. Some did, but I mean they weren’t good reporters. The guys who went to Harvard, there might have been two that I knew of, were not good reporters. The best educated were not good reporters.

H&E: You think they were too comfortable? Too embedded in that class?

I could simplify it and say yes. But what I can also say is, I’m now jumping fifty years to where we are now, it’s like three generations. They commonly go to Harvard, Princeton, Yale.

H&E: Columbia. 

Columbia. Stanford. Or, elite schools in other states. And they’re going to the same schools, as the people in power. The people who are running the government, or Wall Street, or top corporations. When I was a young reporter, the stars on my paper were very unafraid of power. They were not enamored of it.

QED: Obama “sinks 40-foot chip on the 18th hole during Hawaii vacation,” and the House of Stephanopoulos is on it!

* The Hand & Eye Website, which interviewed Talese in his writing studio.